Listen to This: Boundaries?

Kazim Ali’s recent American Poetry Review columns have been stunning. His most recent is a bad-assed belletristic constellation of texts (where he makes a common cadre in media studies—Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek, and The Matrix—meet up with Melville & Dickinson), and it transcends the boundary of a “column” to become an essay. Ali [...]

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Listen to This: Force Multipliers

Years ago, at St. Mark’s New Year’s Poetry Festival, Bob Holman stood up and spoke this poem: “If you see something / say something: / banana.” The crowd cracked up. That was the first successful 9/11 joke I can recall. And, unlike Gilbert Godfrey’s earlier failed attempt at a 9/11 joke at the Friars Club [...]

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In the News: Pretty is as Pretty Does

It’s not that I want it to get ugly, I just don’t want it to be so darned pretty.

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Listen to This: Shrimp!

There is much to love about Amy Hosig’s brief poem in this issue (http://pbq.drexel.edu/poetry/hosig-amy_shrimp.php). In its 14 lines, “Shrimp” makes me remember why poetry feels good to read. Volta. I’m most drawn to the poem’s turns, and the particular nature of what feels like more than a mere turn of thought or change in argument. [...]

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The Poem that Fell from Grace with the Sea

Donald Dunbar You have pretty eyes; your face is the rust on the side of a lost freighter and the first mate is jumping overboard. You’ve got your sealegs now, your bedlegs I mean know the roll and splash of waterbeds but regular beds too, even futons like discount Korean yachts.  This air always does [...]

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At Sea

Laura Didyk My lover naps below while I sun on the stern in my sundress and dream myself a woman born for building ships.  In the cushion of sleep I build this one as I tarry on our Alaskan island more than a century ago. My lover is taken at sea by a striking pirate  [...]

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Tumbleweeds

Patrick Carrington I skitter across the heat of lonely towns  like a drop on a skillet, stopping only  to smooth myself out in bars  with strings of women  who don’t tie themselves  to lives like mine. There was a time when the prophecy of dust clouds rising  from a young woman’s broom  made me wonder  [...]

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Further Adventures Into Private Parts

Arlene Ang 400 pieces of eight for a joint if lost in good company like an evening marrooned with bananas— and all along i thought i was plagiarizing my scent in port royal in the captain’s cabin in his chest of maps—he allowed me to feel around wooden legs allowed me to sleep on that [...]

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