When reading the poem “I Do Not Know Myself” by Hugh Seidman, I felt a sense of loneliness. The poem itself explores ideas of identity and belonging, and challenges the reader to think about their basic human existence and refers to the topic of discovering one’s self. This is a topic I can relate to,…
Are you all right? This is a question we get asked more than one can count. People ask this thinking that it is a simple yes or no question when, in reality, it is so complex. “The Wrong Question” was written by the poet Tony Hoagland. His poems incorporate topics about serious issues, but were…
When I first visited Italy, I was excited to find out a temple-turned-church, complete with Latin inscriptions, was a mere brisk evening walk from my hotel. I also found there was a McDonald’s next to the temple. The irony felt deliberate, as if the universe had tired of subtlety, as if the collision of the…
The dog days of summer are upon me as I am writing this. The heat has settled into a viscous, oppressive thing. The days are a slow-motion descent into a molten world, each hour a heavier, more viscous pull. My mind, trapped in this humid limbo, is split between the sterile glow of my computer…
Kameryn Alexa Carter’s “Antediluvian” seized my attention amidst my perusal of various poetry publications. Its unusual formatting, intentionally constricted, paragraph-like, amid a sea of poems often indulging in unconventional line breaks and expansive white space, drew my focus. Such aforementioned experimentation, ubiquitous to the point of banality, rendered the poem’s compactness a notable departure. This…
Ideas and actions wear their significance like a brightly colored shirt. With too much repetition, the color fades. Ideas become cliché. Actions become mechanical, rehearsed: playacting. Kay Ryan’s poem by that name begins with a short excerpt of prose from W.G. Sebald’s Campo Santo, which explains that participants in tribal rituals of initiation or sacrifice…
I love poetry, but sometimes it frustrates me in the way it inevitably falls short, language unable to measure up to reality. Good poetry is a good approximation of the real world, but it’s still an approximation. Ada Limón’s “The End of Poetry” rejects that approximation — or, at least, it approximates a rejection (how…
I came across the poem “On the Sadness of Wedding Dresses” by James Galvin first published in The Iowa Review. Upon first reading it, I was moved by the poem and appreciated the nostalgic tone Galvin instills in each word. The personification of the wedding dresses “weeping in their closets” was beautiful; the comparison of…
The world is full of countless theories about the processes of attaining the ultimate goal of happiness. Upon first reading Kim Addonizio’s “Verities,” found in Poetry Magazine, I was immediately captivated by the dark tone. Phrases like ”every dog has its choke chain,” “better dead than fed,” and “sticks and stones will break you,” flooded…
I can’t decide if Eduardo C. Corral’s “To the Angelbeast” is about beauty, or about death, or both.The first time I read the poem, I thought it was beautiful. I could imagine the orchard with the grass unmown, two people there together but apart. One would lie in the grass and throw the dirt: “doe…