Theme: Daniel Bosch

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On the occasion of his mother’s eightieth birthday, Dante Gabriel Rossetti gave her a hand-made artwork featuring his poem “The Sonnet.” In the first line of this present he also gave to English poetry a “deathless” (because almost irrefutable) definition of the sonnet form — though the rest of the poem is an already dated pastiche of tired diction, worn-out registers, and exhausted metaphors.Read more

Three of America's most famous poets announced today the immediate availability of new, moderately priced "diffusion lines" based on their celebrated high-end works to be sold online and at mainstream retail outlets such as Walmart, Costco, Sam's, Target, and Barnes & Noble. Representatives of K2 by Kay Ryan, Frederick by Frederick Seidel, and JohnT by John Ashbery (for Target) announced the move at a joint news conference on the sidewalk outside of Century 21 in lower Manhattan.Read more

In Iowa City, in a jail of corn—taller than you are and more tasseled— live out your sentences. In Iowa ice, in the dark of its aquifers, live out your sentences, with the rising sun your warden winking like meter on the floundering plainsRead more

I leave Alberta under the bow of a full moon, take in the skeletal scatter of trees, their scrubby bodies hung low. Friable clouds exculpated the dangerous open of the prairies, I do not relish a treeless landscape. The bus pulls in under the neon of a gas station sign, bobs a greeting with its great length.Read more

I appreciate Lowry’s speaker’s use of the archaic term “mirth” for how we feel about the predicament named in the poem — it seems to name an ideal attitude that is not so easy to make real. The speaker knows there is nothing strange about mistakes of this type, that it’s weirder to make-believe any text we produce is error-free. Read more

Twenty-three brunettes, 10 puffs of pubic hair, nine pairs of panties, two t-shirts, two socks, one tank-top, one bra, one bottle, and one bowling ball—though I suppose it could be a basketball, a medicine ball, or a soccer ball. Twenty legs amputated by the edges of absent frames. Four pairs of legs spread wide open (one of these ass-to-us).Read more

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