Tumbling through the cunt of Elizabeth I, kissing boys and kissing girls, I lock myself inside my house with 365 rooms and fifty-two staircases.
WEB
Humility / Taken on the rocks / With double shot and / Uber driver waiting. . .
a weighty jewel of a sun-bound / harkening, reaches (again) the memory / & malady of a doubtable god, part- / unseen, emergent. // On kite wings, we qualify.
Your hands are like fists all the time now. Lick the webbing / between your cats’ toes and wish they could set you right. / Know that they never can.
Let’s salute the minimal, the fragmentary, the acerbic, the complex, the indefinite and the conceptual. Here is Minarets 11—ready for reading, ruminating and reflecting.
Louis Klee
Rivers I could hear their voices long before I knew what they meant (Wrong.) boiling glue in corridors, goose feathers disinterred from snow somehow still as white as butter. Apart from this, everything opened like the prospect of a good mood, fish eggs easy in the dark inundation. The wide berth is given. But is it? No, No, No, No, No.
Hao Guang Tse
W/ the aim of poisoning the pure minds of the youth John says history sur prises us less than us our selves well sunflowers shock me most most or best infact here esp ecially so since the war against sentiment gave me my glass back that bag of beaten gold in time would be found filled & so leader o please tell that long title that that little looking lens trailing John’s lower lip why the clasp shuts on help & on spilt sun or rather pray why are the Zen masters murderous? I’m asking for a friend
Ellen Morgan Butler
Supermarket 10pm The snack aisle strikes me as too peppy. And I tripped on my own shoes trying to self- checkout too many apricots. Nina Simone on low volume’s really bumming me out. This year, I cried in your kitchen while you made crepes. I stole a tub of ricotta cheese. I was late on purpose and I never did my laundry. It’s fine when the sun’s out. UV kills the mould though it won’t get the jam stain out of my singlet. Listen, there’s so much work being done. So much gathering and display and it’s fine and it’s“Ellen Morgan Butler”
O victor-bird, o vector, / I am like you, a non-state actor, / Death-fletched, alive, immune to all elixirs.
Valleys, oceans, crumbling earth, slices of tomato, milk, the presence of something ethereal, the absence of something wild.
I can only describe the narrator as a lost zoologist who must regress into memory and childhood yet also cannonball our awareness into a strange new world.
They say that one day, powerful star-gazers will be able to detect American tidal waves from the centre of Germany…
I am often concerned by the use of deaths as openers, and about the ethics of condensing the entirety of a person’s life into a soundbite, into an enticing introductory hook.
I don’t like émigré simply because I agree with the book’s sociopolitical underpinnings (although I do), but because it’s beautiful and well-crafted.
I’d heard of Carolyn DeCarlo, Sophie van Waardenberg and Rebecca Hawkes in publications like Starling, Landfall and Sweet Mammalian; AUP New Poets 5 gives them centre-stage.
This is my ambered sarcasm. / This is my garden’s rough / cut blossom my / bitter jewel with veins of pearl / and the hard-edge glow of the / indigestible.
I sat with this book for a very long time. Dipped in and out, from all points, like a capybara in an onsen.
Harkin is active in her writing and recording of what was done and to whom. People from the past return through her words, they do not remain buried in the archives.
This isn’t a book claiming to be anything it’s not. It’s a tender observation of the small things…
by friday / i am 50% used up / tho i’m tired / i make my weekly pilgrimage / taking foodscraps up to the compost bins at the innermost gardens