John W. Evans Only a handful made it to the United States, some as far as Detroit. One killed a Sunday school teacher walking students through the Oregon woods. However many became rumor, stuck on power lines near missile silos, cut into tarps by farmers or chased across the desert with rifles and pickups, only seen or heard after the fact of arrival turned cloud to bulb and flame, morning and empty field, it seemed unjust they might...

Michael T. Young I used to read while nestled in a crook of maple branches, or seated on a slab of concrete that jutted into lake water, striders coasting the rumpled sheets. Reeds on the far shore needled the shallows writing a subtext into palms of sunlight alluding to trout and bass tunneling the deep, to the early alphabets of mud and rock. Mallards skirred the surface by day, bats skimmed it by night, their wings scratching brief...

Michael Tyrell Almost spring, & our dictator’s new order: everyone in our country must French-kiss the frozen utility poles— the boulevards become maypoles of muffled wailing, move too much & you lose the mind, to keep the tongue & the mind pick a word to keep in your mind, blunt like starve or trowel or cudgel, say it will be coming up crocuses soon those clouds not the shoulders of ice-storms,...

Michael Tyrell For Rachel Wetzsteon (1967-2009) The friend, the late formalist who slips into my last REM cycle— whose new language I can’t get or hear in the swarming dream-terminal, but it’s urgent to try, there’s something she must tell me now, holding my wrist rougher than she means to— leaving a mark I know you won’t believe. You’ll say I’m wrong, it’s crazy, the wrist’s barely black & blue. As usual,...

Brandon Lewis That is how the last buffalo herd is culled. I read on, spilling drops of tea on the news page, letters darkened in spots. Across the road, a tree I can’t name buds red. To squint at its branch spellings, to iterate its Latin root does not tell the story quite. Time to relearn spring— clover leaf or cherry blossom, what arrives at first blush and second. And then the herds returning each season. Rangers say they...

As we await release of his forthcoming collection, "The Wanted," Brooklyn poet Michael Tyrell debuts and reads three new poems.

Robert Wrigley We were to know we would never know as much about it as he did. He knew we didn’t care and believed his knowing was evidence. He was a scholar, a critic, a wielder of wit for it, its minutiae and mysteries, which, for him, were no mystery at all. Machinery, maybe. Cogs and pistons, the pinioned heart in the heat of it. Someone asked about love, the fool. Our backs ached. The sun was relentless. He leaned on his hoe...

Robert Wrigley The inquisitive look on the dog’s face makes me happy, suggesting not only her intelligence but my own, for having such an intelligent dog in the first place. Although what it is she wonders about I do not know. Seated in my chair, a book in my lap, I looked up and there she was, regarding me, as though she wondered what this book from the library, so redolent of others like myself, might offer me that she herself...

Adrianne Kalfopoulou There is too much here, the sapphire, the thistle, the oregano blooms in June, everything extravagant – the rich peat of what decays, the ruins that don’t decay, these especially are too much, the temples and statues in their stark marble glow, that simplicity which is not simple at all. This sheen of time, the wear of wars, the famine years of Occupation, lucent as the columns standing stoic, Doric – their...

Scott Hightower “Mutiny Gallery” B.K. Fischer (Winner of the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize) Truman State University Press, 2011, $18.00 B.K. Fischer’s Mutiny Gallery, a novel in verse, is an act of earnest imagination. In a period when much poetry is thin- I biography, it is refreshing to come to a first book that is provocatively metaphoric and hearty… and with a personae, one surmises, set apart from the author. The premise of the...