Theme: Daniel Bosch

Darcie Dennigan is a player. I don’t mean only that she’s a member of team poetry. I mean that she’s one of the sharps, one to keep your eye on at all times, the one to whom you pass the ball when team poetry needs to score. Her fancy is as consistent as her footwork.Read more

SCENE: THE TORCH-LIT office-hewn-from-rock of Skepticus, the principal chamber of his retreat, high above the city. A long work table, strewn with papers, books, scrolls, pens, pencils, and quills; at its center, a laptop computer sits open. At left of the computer, a small pile of Legos, some affixed to each other, but none made into any recognizable object. A low stool stands at attention beneath the table.Read more

Against a black background, part of the face of a fair-skinned woman. The tone and texture of her skin. The curve of her lips. Especially the black of her eyes — as if we could look through her. All these exceed not only what we expect to see when we begin to watch a film, but what we desire to see. Even before the camera slowly swings upward from her mouth to her eyes, even before we realize that those are not opaque black pits but irises.Read more

Take water, evident, that feeds the seas or wind that blows and turns apathetically, the grass that grows and once again gets mowed, or us, growing larger at first, then shrinking wrinkling simplifying to nothing: always changing.Read more

So many tourists have touched the Botero's dick It gleams like a ship's brass bell, Its patina circumscribed by an adoring public.Read more

Jennifer Clarvoe’s little black book Counter-Amores (University of Chicago Press, 2011) closes with a suite of poems each of which is a reversal of one of Ovid’s Amores — his frank and delightful guides to beds and breakfasts along the Tiber. Read more

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“So you’ve shifted much of the actual labor from more highly-trained employees to less-skilled and therefore less-expensive workers?” “They do a much better job than we could do ourselves, with our sophisticated technologies. And because of their effectiveness, the scientists and management professionals on our team are free to pursue other matters.” “How much of the workers’ effectiveness is due to their size?”Read more

Years ago, reviewing Dambudzo Marechera’s collection of stories and poems, The House of Hunger, I called him the Zimbabwean Keats. I don’t want to recant the estimation of the power of his work such a moniker implies, but it should be said that Marechera was no slight, mild-mannered, generous and sensitive surgeon from Cheapside.Read more

William Pope.L is famous for (among other things) carrying a business card that identifies him as “The Friendliest Black Artist in America.” It’s a clever gag because it makes itself true, in a way, every time it draws people closer. The card must be especially useful when Pope.L does business with people who dread Black men or Black artists. But the gag here is always already the second trope Pope.L has thrown at us. Read more

Are you at a loss? Why not get a Master's? Hundreds of programs are filled up with intense People like you, each class as good as last year's.Read more

We cannot fathom his mysterious head, Through the veiled eyes no flickering ray is sent: But from his torso gleaming light is shed As from a candelabrum; inward bent His glance there glows and lingers.Read more

But it could very well be that Harvard University Press is smart enough to recognize a Harvard edition of LTYP will have an imprimatur. Whatever its relative virtues, the Harman translation out of Cambridge, as Banville points out, is “likely to become the standard one.”Read more

I mean that the poem, and it’s like a lot of Seidel’s work, dresses his poetry in all the accoutrements of deliberate engagement with issues of class and color and need and responsibility, of inequity and iniquity, and all that equipment ought to be used. The speaker shows no indication that he knows what he’s talking about or why he’s talking about it. He notices a bunch of angles on ethics, but settles for a minimally competent aesthetics, when he could have had both. He’s a compulsively yapping set of dingy teeth.Read more

“Ferry,” the English noun and verb, is derived from the Old Norse “ferja,” to move across a body of water. “Ferry” is related to German “fahren,” to ride, or to travel, the sense of which includes duration. It is richly cognate with the Latin “ferre,” to bear, which is legible in such common English words as “transfer,” “infer,” and “refer.”Read more

He had started the series from inside Plato’s cave, so when William Kentridge launched his sixth and final Charles Eliot Norton Lecture with a retelling of the story of Perseus, he gave familiar things back to his audience—the myth itself, and art’s gesture of circling toward origin at closure.Read more

At readings, as in Greek triremes, We sit in rows, and row, and row, Facing the stern, red-rimmed, and doughy Face of someone Helen knows. Read more

Fist hams, like bats, from rafters. Mouth meal ruminant in burlap sacks. Oxidized tongue silver. Eye beads' caviar. Read more

Pringles are fun! Simultaneously convex and concave, Pringles mirror the society that demands them. Someday Pringles may be revealed to comprise an epic structure.Read more