Now That Memory Has Become So Important, Karl Gartung, Midwestern Writers Publishing House, 2008 [ click here to order ] It’s hard not to be moved by Karl Gartung’s first book, Now That Memory Has Become So Important, published in 2008 by Midwestern Writers Publishing House. Foremost, it’s a beautiful book comprised of carefully crafted […]

      It seems absurd to write a poem out of the scraps and random thoughts of a day or two. Encounters, conversations, what one finds in a book or newspaper, what one remembers of a dream, however vivid. The only way to justify the attempt is the knitting together of phrase with phrase by way of […]

“Can this be New Rochelle?” George asked J—. “I lived in a house on the water, near the harbor, in a small village.” J— replied, “What village? What harbor?” —Mary Oppen This is true: the work before you is still the work ahead of me. It is not George Oppen, but something other than what […]

The first child is an Engine. The second child locks his arms around the waist of the Engine, bites into the back of the Engine’s neck & holds there; the third child joins the second in a similar way. These three form the Freight Train. Soon the skin of their mouths grow over the bite […]

Rhode Island Notebook, Gabriel Gudding, Dalkey Archive, 2007 [click here to order] Gabriel Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook consists of transcriptions of poems written into a large notebook on the passenger seat of the poet’s Toyota Echo during twenty-two one-thousand + -mile trips from Normal, Illinois to Providence, Rhode Island between September 2002 and December 2004. […]

C.c. He is one whose command of words, he is another whose command of words and music, I never find unmoving. I sit alone, tossing horseshoes. Outside the horses gallop down the middle of the streets, or run wild over plains, their long dark manes, banners in the wind, sleek rumps rising, falling, magnificent animals […]

The bird opens its beak and sings its note And then the beak comes together in silence. So Nature and Living meet together in void Like the closing of the bird’s beak After its song. Heaven and earth come together in the Unbegun, And all is foolishness, all is unknown, all is like The lights […]

dear name I’ve started dear same all the time I’ll be you saying my teeth glow enough right outside some smiling at each other assholes party dawdling on thou shalt not skateboard painted on a church parking lot I’ll be you if you want threatened and hiding out there towns like we have hours in […]

            And as they floated down the gentle current             The lyre made mournful sounds, and the tongue murmured             In mournful harmony, and the banks echoed             The strains of mourning.                                     — from Metamorphoses, Book 11 (tr. Rolfe Humphries) Having descended into Hell; having found, led, and lost Eurydice; having re-ascended, […]