Patrick Phillips is the author of three collections of poetry and a work of nonfiction. His 2004 collection, Chattahoochee, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and his 2015 collection, Elegy for a Broken Machine, was a finalist for the National Book Award. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia. Phillips earned his PhD in English Renaissance…
Lucia Perillo’s “Samara” is a celebration of small and simple beauty. Perillo died at 58 in 2016, shortly after this poem appeared in the 2012 edition of The Best American Poetry. She died from complications of multiple sclerosis, a disease which inspired much of her poetry. Perhaps the awareness that her life might soon come…
The first time I read this poem, an interpretation so brilliant and illuminating came to me that I proudly jammed my bookmark in between the pages, ready to capture the magic into a piece of writing once I finished following the voice inconveniently calling me from the other room. This is not that. It’s been…
Rajiv Mohabir’s “Dove” spirals the reader down a rollercoaster of a love story. The title itself plays with the reader’s expectations; doves are symbols of peace, hope, and purity, so the reader starts the poem with expectations of a positive experience. This is not so different from love. Going into love for the first time…
“Kinstugi is the japanese art of mending precious pottery with gold” Mending the broken. Sometimes it’s simpler just to throw away the fragments and find something new to love instead. Sometimes, though, on those monumentally rare and precious occasions, the kinds we treasure forever, we find something worth fixing. Not just worth the trouble and…
Serifs, I say. I like serifs. I like serifs too. They’re stable, constant, waiting, trembling, a boat. Bookends, I like to think, tape stretched thin across all four canvas-sides, quivering under the weight of three layers of oil, three layers of thick piled-on paint. It’s the curl on the end of a lowercase g, the…
I have never been close with my family. Any road trip is awkward, filled with broken down cars and arguments in the restaurant that make everyone else feel uncomfortable. There were times when I wished for a new family like the confused six-year-old that I was, but now I am plainly used to it, tired…
Daylight savings, the event, not the poem, annually both bequeaths upon and steals away from us an hour. The significance of one hour has been rapidly both declining and growing over the years. With the increase in technology, more and more can be done in one hour. In the olden days, an hour could buy…
Famous poet, Brad Leithauser, wrote A Good List while lying awake in his bed in Iceland one evening. “A Good List” gives a humorous and lighthearted list of things Leithauser has “never done wrong” (Leithauser). His literal “good list” ranges from describing how he has never stolen any gnomes from a garden to his refusal to forge a lottery ticket. At first I was curious as to why Leithauser was going into depth about his “good list.” However, it becomes clear by the end of the poem that he uses this list to distract and exhaust out his brain, when…
The poem, From the “Lives of My Friends,” by Michael Dickman, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/12/14/from-the-lives-of-my-friends was first published in the New Yorker in 2009 and is a coming of age story that explores the impact of childhood friends on our lives as we grow old with them. Michael Dickman grew up in Portland, Oregon and is the author of three books, The End of the West, Flies, and Mayakovsky’s Revolver. He is the recipient of The Honickman First Book Prize, The May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Kate Tufts Award from Claremont College, and the 2009 Oregon…
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