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...

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

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

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...

His stunning collection "Devotions" has been nominated for both this year's National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award; this month, we're honored to debut four new poems from Bruce Smith's latest series, "Thinly Sealed," supplemented with readings by the poet.

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...