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,...

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...

One of the most gifted and dynamic writers of our time discusses candidly life, liberty, and the pursuit of poetry.

Bruce Snider See the brown mutt bleed through its garland of burrs, a torn possum drooling dried streaks of foam, lice-flecked raccoons on the yellow line, split wide. See how wholly they open to us in death, to the moon, to the red elm scabbed with mites. They open to riverbeds and the song of the wren, to flowering plums and the barbed wire fence. Over and over they open to carrion birds catching scent, beginning to rise. Even...

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...

Winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award and six Pushcart Prizes, Robert Wrigley has long been one of our favorite poets. This month, we are proud to feature him debuting and reading three new poems.

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...

The Pulitzer Prize finalist and Harper Lee Award-winning poet reads and discusses his work.

Jonathan Wells Not just a crack but a chasm in the floor Not just a room but a helix of rooms Not a hall to follow but a hallucination of halls Nor a load-bearing wall but the Great Wall of China Not one mountain between us but a range of mountains Not one sea but generations of seas Not just the harbor of Harbortown but the Gulf of Aqaba Not just bread to share but flour and salt Not a cold mug but a mortuary of teacups Not the...