Poetry
If you can’t stand the first person, / get out of the kitchen. / Similar but escalating sleights of hand: / he wants to eat both the girl and the food in her basket. / She is past specialness, / doubling the likelihood. In such young women, / traumas curl / till Christmas ribbon. The greatest predictor of red / is oxygen.
The writer on the space between poetry and prose, how fighting is like dancing, and the resonant symbolism of the idiophone.
Part of the Theory + Practice series.
Overcast cobalt, tile unbolted, pictures / On loan require empty space / Like an expletive. Grisaille pigeons, / Endemic to our swamp of / Commission.
Performance as a poetry of long duration.
Lying on the couch all day glass of water a highly disgusting smoothie four coloring books, / a myriad of psychiatric and “anti-inflammatory” medication / anti-inflammatory Jewish history books / anti-inflammatory pretzel sticks / anti-inflammatory medicinal cannabis
Essays that investigate the poetics of “no.”
You are magnetic in the old way. / For Duchamp, the neutrality of objects / You stand in a room of your own design. / becomes a sort of anti-aesthetic
PREPARE no night creature accidental enemy / encounters return to us in witch cradles, monsters by a hairsbreadth / these our works melted no / accident these fires these crashes / capitulate to what is meant by the past as a whole / melt, fall back into accomplishment the grasp of who / prepares to give the message
On more than one occasion I have been accused of disliking Langston Hughes. Untrue.
The poet on the politics of the gaze, the migratory act of reading, the anxiety of bilingualism, and the universality of shame.
It was a rough road—the roughness agreeably generic, not without art: good bumps and pneumatic fakeroots, little pools of gel. Into one of these last I let myself tumble, thinking, as I fell, how I would have liked to watch the pool crackle and blaze like the fire-in-fireplace I’d been sexting without response for years.
Two poets and a photographer discuss the presence of absence, the power of the number three, and art as documentation and disruption.
In An Approach, the sentence gradually evolves: word choices change subtly; phrases are introduced, transposed, or deleted; punctuation shifts and changes form. Through these shifts and disruptions, the text begins to accede to a nonlinear logic, through which we can glimpse “the unspoken, which is its subject, between the words, through the words.”
Writer and vocalist Keckler performs impersonations of obscure larger-than-life personalities he meets. In her first novel, Laing impersonates Kathy Acker.
Broken, the madrilenial butterfly finally suckles / from the dime blood at the ankle of the tube sock.
if the conditions for learning aren’t humiliation / then I must be alone in order to be a modern / kind of student one whose failures have not made them / so anxious they are unable to be a steady archer
a helmut / made of kohl / end poem / right there / on the head / of a german / chancellor! no
the birdcage is gasproof I have an important message for you the birds are wired /
peace is blind as teargas love your lungs will not collapse but swell
at dusk each day i like to think / of all my new friends in different parts / of the city jerking off / running baths / vaping weed getting sober / running their mouths / & reading poetry aloud to one another.
