An excerpt from “In Plain Sight” by C. Dale Young, one of two poems appearing in Waxwing:

 

In Plain Sight

Alongside the twisting road to Erice, the cane fields
moved like water, the leaves and stalks bending
and rippling like water under the hand of the wind.

We had never seen sugarcane growing this way
except in the Caribbean; it had to be a mirage, a trick
of the imagination. But it was no trick, the cane

brought to Sicily by the Arabs in the Tenth Century.
Because Europe was sour, because it was addicted
to honey colonized by bacteria and its resulting toxins, […continue reading here]

An excerpt from the poem, “A Pond in Japan,” by Chase Twichell, which may be found with two other poems in The American Journal of Poetry:

 

“A Pond in Japan”

I told Mom about a pond I saw in Japan,
how due to the small sculpted hills
and undulating shore, rocks and dwarf pines,

nowhere on its circumference was there
a vantage from which one could see
the pond in its entirety. […continue reading here]

The following is an excerpt from Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy’s new book, 57 Octaves Below Middle C,                   available at Four Way Books:

 

 

 

“At dusk, as always, Bender sang to us”

At dusk, as always, Bender sang to our congregation, silver
hair greasing her blouse, tin on the toes of her boots.
When we were grade-school children, she and I liked duct
tape. We liked it like you could never believe. Our favorite
thing to steal from the corner store was that silver coil. The
way it ripped across, how it stretched over. It gripped!
She stood on the white twenty-gallon empty drum, her boot
heels burning the plastic, her tempo uneven. We were a
communion of over a dozen church-bums who loved her
and were frightened by her hawk-at- the-tree- crown and
hawk-on- the-glide shoulders and head, her wings at her
sides, her hands palms out, fingers curled up.
Bender and I once duct-taped a picture of our father, who
was dying in the Simic State Penitentiary hospital, to a globe
sent by our Aunt Horror. On the globe our father clung to
the deep South. He spun fast without flying off. When the
globe slowed down, his head did a half-turn on his neck,
then a turn back by half that. We tore the thing apart, duct-
taped the entire planet, kicked it anywhere we wanted.
Dented part of Asia, most of Antarctica. Had to re-tape. [read more here]

Poet Marianne Boruch appears as a special feature in Indiana Poet Laureate Shari Wagner’s Through the Sycamores:

The Art of Suspension: The Poetry of Marianne Boruch

There’s so much to admire in a Marianne Boruch poem–where to start? I love the surprising metaphors; the complexity of ideas; the enjambment of lines that leave me slightly off kilter and in suspense; the intimate relationship between sound, sense, and form.  Maybe what I love most is Marianne’s passion for the act of seeing, for surveying the world–up close, from a distance, or in the wings. She raises the camera, the binoculars or the stereopticon. In one poem she notes how her son peers at the “enormous eye” of a horse, and in another she adopts the perspective of a hundred-year-old cadaver, head wrapped in towels, who views her own dismemberment.  She ventures into the eagle-eyed perch of a virtual bombardier, one who hones in through the remote sensing device of a drone. In Marianne’s poems, the act of looking has many dimensions, including the ethical.

The importance of seeing is reinforced here by the poet’s original watercolors (artwork never before exhibited). . . . continue reading here.

C. Dale Young is the 2017 winner of The Fellowship of Southern Writers Hanes Award For Poetry.

Congratulations, C. Dale!