Poetry
A geo-spatial experience of text and poetics.
From Return to the Yakne Chitto: Houma Migrations (Neighborhood Story Project, University of New Orleans Press, 2019), a collaborative ethnography of Houma lifeways at the ends of the Louisiana bayou.
In English the burning city / Hecuba dreams in my hand // Come man with cup / and hard-luck pitch // Upstream the brunch rush / shines upon our heads
Out, like fireflies, from the inter-dimensional, / silver disks at edge of picture hover over Hillary / with swaddled child, John Podesta counterpose beside her, / in a painting I’d like to paint, had I been a painter, / trading in detail from the too-smooth desert
For Marwa Helal and me, the histories of our two countries—Egypt and Sudan—are inextricably linked, our shared Nile both the most obvious and fertile metaphor.
a surgeon takes / a shirt off. / a struggle. / a shrug. / a shrinking / blinking quiet. / give him his bottle / so he can suck on it.
Featuring selections by Tom Comitta, Molly Crabapple, Veronica Scott Esposito, Carlos Fonseca, and more.
The internet does a better job of documenting / the way we feel when something soft, especially / a mammal, is very cute, than poetry does.
yours in torchlight / we audit our equipment / note how few genuine distractions / present as distraction first
Winner of BOMB’s 2018 Poetry Contest, selected by Dawn Lundy Martin.
Navajo language, photography, and the shifting landscape of the Southwest guide the poet’s latest collection, Dissolve.
The poet on returning to the Philippines, writing about queer identity, and producing a book that is a document of the body.
The fish survive all that radiation, whatever is a go-pass beyond poison. / Snow falling off at a slant from the scientific station / ice adaptations that lead to the new normal. / An owner’s manual under a concrete donut, in its hole someone has planted a baby cactus.
blink twice, because you’re in / love. It is springtime, the merry / etcetera, look ahead, where we’re going / there’s a clearing and in the clearing / stands a boxer who must have slipped / his collar on the path running through / the field. He is panting, drooling, is all white / except for the pink of his exceptions– /
on up the mirroring woodpath that is mirroring from / the glaring lake to the right as towards us 1 beautiful wanderer / and over the roots of the mighty trees I strayed / while the clanging sun that is the high midday light / dusted through the vaulted treetops that time in Altaussee
The citizen investigator as poet.
I first encountered Sesshu Foster through his cotranslation of Juan Felipe Herrera’s masterpiece Akrilica and an anthology he coedited, Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry. It was 1990: I’d just returned from six years of intense political and cultural involvement outside the US. The Gulf War was right on the horizon, and in the hyper-stratified world of US poetry, where class and cosmos had taken backseats to an almost purely theoretical politics and poetics, I was in search of allies and kindred spirits. With Foster’s work, I felt I’d struck pay dirt.
for a fee I guess / my sovereign entity / muckrake / frowning sun and yet it is a storyteller
The poet’s first novel, Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, concerns a woman’s unnamed grief, as well as the meta-dialogue between the narrative’s author and the critic reading her manuscript.
The author discusses her forthcoming novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, fiction as impetus for personal change, and the inhumanity of the creative class.
