A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).
This week: gods of brokenness, a hollowed-out hosiery factory, end paper mood-matches, quokkas sleeping in the shade, and much more. Enjoy.
There’s something energetic about having vibraphone and parachute in the same poem. Is the opening too seemingly glib in its absurd surrealism? Or is it a good way into the more emotionally more real element of the poem? […]
I do love this failure.
Gary Barwin, ERRATA: how to know if a poem “works” or if it’s finished
Something weathered in the voice that greeted me, a bit creaky, like worn mahogany. Pin-point sharp, too. Trained by my father as a child to guess the voice of a speaker without it being announced, I plumped straight away for Margaret Atwood. She said:
This was Canada. You didn’t think you were going to be successful. You thought you were going to be dedicated. It wasn’t considered a career, it was considered a vocation, like a priest.
Margaret Atwood, Woman’s Hour, 5 November 2025And I thought: that’s it. That’s all I need to listen to. Nothing can improve upon its wisdom. (I was wrong: the whole interview is studded with such nuggets.) Thank you, Radio 4, I take it all back. My other thought was: that is a proper poet’s answer. It’s basically the same thing a prizewinning friend of mine said to me a thousand years ago: ‘I don’t write for prizes. In the end, the process is all any of us have.’
The coffee now made and the stairs climbed, I shuffled back into my chair, took a sip, and reached for my notebook. Where had they got to, those lines about the [———-]? Could they be worked on for a moment? Could I remember again my vocation and commit to being dedicated? I gazed out of the window. This was not Canada, but Plymouth, in the rain. It turns out I could.
Anthony Wilson, This was Canada
This month is always a tricky one. Some of the best things in my life have happened in November, but also some of the worst. It always feels like an unruly month anyway, posed between the spookyness of Halloween and the festivity of Christmas. With the end of daylight savings time, the dark comes even earlier and stays so long. I am never sure what to wear or which coat to bring. How warm or cold spaces will be. The other night I made sure to wear tights for the first time this year, but still found myself burrowing under my coat while we watched Frankenstein in the chilly theater. I can’t just throw on my shoes and run downstairs or to the alley to throw out trash. Leaving the apartment requires preparation. Tights. Coats. Boots. Many layers. When I stay home, hours after 4pm are dark and strange and I never quite know what to do with myself. It’s too early to stop working but way too early to just go watch something. It feels like midnight but its only 8pm.
Still good things can happen. In 2000, I managed to land the library job that changed the course of everything and brought me back to Chicago and settled into the place I worked for two decades after that. I came in for an interview on November 1st, was hired on Veteran’s Day, and moved over Thanksgiving weekend to the city I had left after grad school a year and a half before. In 2005, I received a call one morning from the press that wanted to publish my very first collection of poems and floated on a cloud all day on that momentum alone. Other Novembers are hazier. Some delightful. Some darker. Like the one in 2019 where I moved out of the studio, sad that it was no longer financially doable due to rising rents and salary stagnation, which had been supplementing my shop income for the 12 years I had the space.
Kristy Bowen, novembers
The title and first line establish the situation of the poem: a tour guide is showing us around the labyrinth; we infer pretty quickly that this particular labyrinth is the mythic home of the minotaur: the “it” that was kept here. The pathos is quickly established as well, the hard rhyme of “their own” and “soup bone” providing an ironic conceptual rhyme—one typically doesn’t require their kin to subsist on scraps—and the shorthand of “beneath the stair” for the dungeon beneath the palace shrinking the scale down to human domesticity. We need not dismiss this story as yet another expected excess of royalty: instead, Stallings encourages us to think of our own kin, our own homes.
The passive voice that opens the second stanza introduces another sort of ironizing distance in “When howls were heard.” The suffering of the imprisoned minotaur, chucked down into Daedalus’s basement funhouse, is perceivable, sure, but no one’s here to own up to it. Instead it’s presented as an agentless action, the language of academic and corporate writing, employed as abdication from accountability, a means of distorting or mutating language to obscure the active cruelty. Again the scale is reframed, and the king and queen of Crete are imagined as your average upper-middle-class couple sipping sherry after dinner and politely excusing their guests so that they might go manage the monster in the basement.
Vanessa Stauffer, “Tour of the Labyrinth” by A.E. Stallings
Laura Theis’ Introduction to Cloud Care is physically slighter than the Finlay and Kinsella books, but it has its own heft. Theis is a German poet who lives in Oxford and writes in her adopted language, English. The poems collected here offer a series of windows into a world that melds the private and public, domestic and natural spheres. For instance, the opening lines of ‘There Used to Be a House Here’ moves the reader quickly from observation of the world to a meditation on natural magic
but now it’s a tree-walled
ruin under an open skyshe has learned that
the generosity of birds isa witchcraft beyond
pendulums or sageBut Theis is not indulging in a kind of nostalgic longing for some kind of pure nature, as she calls out in ‘Oak Coppice’, a coppice being a kind of technological intervention in natural process:
Poets have told me over and over about sitting in nature,
staying away from screens. But I am typing this on my phone.
I wish I had not looked up
the meaning of coppice.Coppicing is, in its way, a form of imposed metamorphosis, and shapeshifting is a central concern of many of these poems, from tips on dating a were-hare, through a lover who it seems is being unfaithful with trees:
She returns home to me with leaves in her hair,
her cheeks flushed,
always satisfied, serene.to a prose poem called ‘I Wonder How Ovid Dealt with This’ in which the work itself is the thing that shapeshifts.
Billy Mills, Recent Reading November 2025: A Broken Sleep Special
Tourists scale the tumulus and find,
Ann E. Michael, Magnificent
at sunrise, eagles, lions, and Apollo,
gods of brokenness, unhumbled despite
centuries of disregard. Extinct.
I started studying this parsha last week in preparation for writing poetry about it and teaching it this week. I had drafted a line or two, but it just wasn’t flowing. Last night I woke in the middle of the night and suddenly realized: I was going about it wrong. Instead of trying to put myself in Ya’akov’s shoes, I should put myself in Rachel’s. The combination of that spark, and this teaching, brought the poem through me.
Of course it’s anachronistic to imagine the Biblical Rachel quoting psalms, which wouldn’t be written for a few thousand years. But that’s no big deal in the garden of Torah interpretation. As the saying goes, אין מוקדם ומאוחר בתורה / ein mukdam u’m’uhar baTorah, “there’s no before and after in Torah.” In God’s time perhaps it’s all simultaneous anyway.
Rachel Barenblat, Rachel speaks
I just finished proofing some poems (a poem in the Jan/Feb issue of Poetry, two in Sugar House Review) and an essay called “The Unfenced Field and Poetry” (forthcoming in Third Coast), and winter is so in the air here in North Carolina. I’ve been binge-reading Susan Howe after reading her gorgeous new Penitential Cries (so. good.) as well as 100 Years of Solitude, and feeling surrounded by good books, if nothing else.
Han VanderHart, Poetry, Poetry for November and December
How does your most recent work compare to your previous?
Well my most recent work, IRØNCLAD, an illustrated hybrid collection, is coming out mid October with Spuyten Duyvil. I always try and approach a new work from a fresh angle, and IRØNCLAD is my first book that was not written on a typewriter or in word-processing software, but directly into the layout program, InDesign. The reasoning was to try and take advantage of the actual typography of the poem or prose piece. The book is set in the fictional world of The Iron Plier Society, who themselves are trying to make sense of their own archeological record. Fragments uncovered in the geological strata inform the book and the narrative. As you move deeper into the book, you discover, fragment by fragment, artifact by artifact, what appears to be the evolution of a civilization—yet, you can never quite be sure that what you have discovered in the damp earth faithfully represents your progenitors intentions (every interpretation comes with its own set of biases also). And, it is easy to misinterpret those too!
My previous collection, which came out with Unlikely Books in May this year, is the poetry collection Spells for the Wicked, which certainly informs IRØNCLAD. In fact, you might say that IRØNCLAD is the culmination of many years of addressing the subject of mythology and how it informs the later narrative and structure of a given society or culture.
How does it feel different?
Although they are two entirely different books, narratively, linguistically, typographically even, they do address some of the same principles in their own fashion. I consider myself a writer of books rather that a writer of individual poems or pieces of fiction. Much of my more recent work crosses the boundaries between fiction and poetry. In my earlier work, I may have been more concerned with presenting a given poetic form. These days I allow the book to inform me, rather than lying down rules in advance. Essentially though, I always try to approach each book project with a slightly different angle: be it the method for writing it (i.e. handwritten, typewriter, direct to computer), the environment I am writing in, or in some cases with a collaborator, the collaborative process itself. All of these things can significantly influence the outcome and inform the work, sometimes in surprising ways.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Marc Vincenz
Now I am standing at the little window on the landing watching the weather and there the magpie is again, sitting in the sycamore, staring straight in at me. I have no fight to argue with a bird today. I’m watching the weather. After driving all the way out to the cancer hospital this week, full of nerves and strategy for sitting through five hours of treatment, they cancelled the chemo and rescheduled. The day the chemo is supposed to happen has snow and ice warnings, the Wolds might be thick with snow and I know we’ll struggle to get across, so we’ll have to cancel and move it to next week, unless my brother can get away from work and take his four by four. If it’s cancelled, my mum will be relieved because she is dreading the treatment like nothing I’ve ever seen. But it will be yet another delay, the clock ticking. Her precious days taken up with all this bullshit of waiting and driving and waiting and driving.
I work on the poetry commission. Finish it, sign it off. A job well done. I’m excited to see it in its next evolution. The simple pleasure of artists working together. The sparks of excitement over idea exchange. I make a big pot of tea, return to the desk.
Snow. But it doesn’t last long. I feel it before I see it. The room darkens around me, the sky pushing down on the trees, then that silent strangeness of snow falling. Frida and I stand at the window and watch.
Wendy Pratt, Blotmonað: Month of sacrifices
I’m happy to share the third poetry video from my book Temporary Shelters. The poem, Gunpowder Homestead, explores my fascination with the old house ruins and foundations I sometimes run into on woods hikes in my home state of Pennsylvania.
Whenever I encounter a place like this, I think about the people who lived here once 150 or more years ago–how their lives were different from mine, how the land and the world may have been different, and what happened that the place fell into ruin.
Grant Clauser, Video for Gunpowder Homestead
Well, I probably shouldn’t write a review of Christopher James’ new pamphlet, The Ice Sonnets (Dithering Chaps, 2025), given that my endorsement appears on its back cover, but I can recommend it thoroughly and suggest you get hold of a copy for yourself by visiting the Dithering Chaps webshop. To give you a flavour of this top-notch collection, here’s that aforementioned endorsement…
Matthew Stewart, Christopher James’ The Ice Sonnets
‘In The Ice Sonnets, Christopher James tells the story of Shackleton’s expedition via a collage effect of juxtaposing exquisitely drawn pen portraits of its participants, interweaving the characters, drawing out the group dynamics that develop in extreme conditions. These poems tell a highly specific tale with universal ramifications.’
In effect, it’s a sequel to The Penguin Diaries of 2017, which dealt with Robert Scott’s ill-fated attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1912.
Inevitably, The Penguin Diaries, though similar in that it is a 65-sonnet sequence, had the mood of an elegy, because the expedition ended in tragedy with Scott and his final team dying on the ice just a few miles from safety. While Scott’s story has taken on the legend of heroic British failure – they reached the Pole, only to find the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, had beaten them to it, then died on the way back – The Ice Sonnets is a celebration of survival against enormous odds.
Once again James chooses to give each member of the expedition a sonnet to themselves. Each acts like a snapshot, a pen-picture, of what made each man remarkable. After all, it was a bonkers idea. Having worked in Canada in winter, I know how horrendously cold it can get – and I was nowhere near the (North) Pole. It seems to me just plain weird that anyone would bother to freeze themselves to death, in Scott’s case, to go to the extreme point of our planet and plant a flag in it.
Exploration of the earth is not something we bother too much about, however, in 2025, because it’s been mapped, scanned, analysed, explored physically and psychologically in intense detail. Any one of us can see satellite images of the tiniest scrap of land or sea. This is obviously a vast contrast to how the ‘globe’ appeared to our ancestors. Britons were fed the idea of Empire, of ‘Darkest Africa’, of a world to be conquered and colonised. Men like Scott and Shackleton captured the imagination – and did, because they took the immense risk of travelling into the vast, frozen unknown, provide us with a greater communal knowledge of the planet on which we all live. Their achievements, as strange as they might seem to some now, remain impressive, their lives enigmatic, worthy in themselves of exploration.
What James has done here is provide, by dedicating to each individual a poem of fourteen lines, a distilled impression of who they were. In doing so, he delves into the character, teasing out detail, giving each a separate identity within the whole, and so providing a convincing insight into not only an individual life but how that person fitted into the overall ‘team’. About how we human beings work individually and collectively.
Bob Mee, THE ICE SONNETS by CHRISTOPHER JAMES
For composers, there is a certain significance in the 8th opus. And Christian Lehnert gestures towards this significance in the titling of his eighth poetry collection, Opus 8: Wickerwork.
Designating itself “a nature book,” Wickerwork is now (partly) available in Richard Sieburth’s English-language translation, and in his tantalizing prefatory essay that supplies context and enriches Lehnert’s wickers. The book is divided into seven linked chapters or movements, overseen by a unique epigraph.
And each of the seven movements is composed of seven contrapuntal poems that face one another across the page’s seam. On the left: the solo voicings of a couplet in alexandrine meter. On the right: the chorales of an octave in iambic tetrameter. Sieburth likens Lehnert’s distichs to the “phanopaeia” that Ezra Pound defined as “a casting of images on the visual imagination.”
Names
The name is an herb / a seedling and a shaft /
Risen from the sound / of wood and oil and sap.In these poems, Lehnert uses a virgule to indicate a pause or breath within the line, thus connecting the poem’s way of being — and breathing— to a convention in German baroque verse, namely, the use of a separatrix to serve as a guide for oral reading and performance.
Alina Stefanescu, Nominations in Christian Lehnert’s poetic forms.
Frost left its edges on the deck and steps but I find a dry spot to sit, my coffee’s steam seeming to fill the gray sky. I try to still my mind’s constant conversation and just breathe in the damp cold, hear the barrage as individual songs, ignore the intrusion of should-have-cut-back-the-lavender, of next-year-I’ll-dig-up-the-lizard’s-tail. Study again the difficult present, amid the uncertainty of tomorrow, of the next hour, next minute. It takes work to be in the world like this. To be an extension of it, not a mover through it. But of course, I am both. As I am an impatient observer of my species, and inescapably, one and the same.
I admire this long poem by Barbara Tomash for its unreined wander but its careful containment too. There is no escaping itself.
Marilyn McCabe, to hide the sound of the groaning enormity
Kujō Takeko – 11 Tanka (1920-1928), by Dick Whyte:
All the blood in my body is frozen;
Only the cold sword of reason
Flashes within me.The Forgotten Poets Newsletter, from which this tanka is taken, “is dedicated to out-of-print, obscure, and generally under-appreciated poets and poems, particularly from the late-1800s and early-1900s.” Dick Whyte, the person who curates and writes the newsletter also has “a specific interest in the intertwining histories of tanka and haiku, both in Japanese and English, and their relationship to the beginnings of free-verse.” The issue from which the above tanka comes is about Kujō Takeko, a woman whose poetry would be a “significant influence on the shintai’shi (“new poetry”) and shin’tanka (“new tanka”) movements in Japan. The tanka I’ve quoted above, along with all the others in this issue of Forgotten Poets, were translated by Glenn Hughes and Yozan T. Iwasaki. (There is a slightly more detailed bio of Takeko here.)
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #50
3rd Wednesday has published my poem “Le Plus Ça Change” on their website.
I am very pleased with this small poem because it was formed by looking at two poems which were not quite working and taking the best parts of each (the images, of course) and combining them. Perhaps it shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did to try connecting these pieces, since they were both about things French. But the brain gets into ruts of thought sometimes; the process is a great pleasure when something breaks through.
Ellen Roberts Young, Poem On Line
I’m pleased to have five poems and verse translations in the new issue of Literary Imagination (volume 27.3, pp. 299-304). Literary Imagination is the journal of the American Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers and is unusual in publishing a mixture of scholarship, essays, poems and translations accessible to writers, critics and teachers outside as well as within academia. The new editor, Paul Franz, is doing something really exciting with it — the long piece in this issue by James Tusing on Alice Monro is really superb and has already garnered a good deal of attention.
The five pieces I have in this issue are quite varied: the first is a translation of Ancient Greek prose into English verse, from Julian the Apostate (readers who read this post about Greek a while ago will recognise the extract). The second is a poem of my own linked loosely to that passage, called ‘Reading Julian the Apostate on my late father’s birthday’. The third is a verse translation of a Pāli poem from the Therīgāthā, a collection of poems written by early Buddhist nuns. (I wrote briefly about this collection here.) The fourth is a loose and experimental version of Horace, Odes 1.10. The fifth is a poem of my own called ‘Latin didactic’ that is in part about reading the Georgics.
Victoria Moul, Five poems and translations in “Literary Imagination”
If you haven’t heard the term, a beta reader is someone who reads an early draft of a book and provides feedback. They are not editors. They don’t provide line-level changes or suggestions. Instead, they answer questions and give overall impressions.
If you ask ten people for an opinion on poetry, you will get ten different answers. For that reason, I chose to keep my pool of beta readers very small, sticking to only four writers—Heidi Fiedler, Jillian Stacia, Michelle Awad, Elise Powers—and my mom and husband.
It’s a strange thing to share your work with beta readers. You’re not just putting the book out there for people to read. You’re sharing it and asking the hard questions: What’s working? What isn’t? What would you cut? Etc.
My beta readers’ reflections helped me see the book more clearly than I could on my own, and most importantly, made me feel less alone in it all. After years of working on the poems in this collection, sharing it felt incredible. I’d chosen my readers with great intention, and they treated my work with care and respect.
Allison Mei-Li, Behind the book
I’m thrilled and deeply honored that my poem “Clutch” was selected for today’s Poem-a-Day series by The Academy of American Poets, curated by the incredible Tacey M. Atsitty, author of (At) Wrist (University of Wisconsin Press, November 14, 2023).
This recognition means so much to me, and I’m grateful to Tacey for championing voices and poetry that connect us all. Make sure to check out the other poems she selected in the month of November. Each poem includes comments from the poet about the poem and an audio recording.
Trish Hopkinson, My poem “Clutch” selected for Poets.org Poem-a-Day series!
cloud gazing…
cloud gazing by tom clausen
I thought about it
but wasn’t sure
what I’d do
with an empty mind
I’ve been writing a lot about the Firth of Forth. I live near where the estuary opens into the North Sea, and when I look south across the Firth, it’s easy to imagine that this is a scene from thousands of years ago. In certain lights there aren’t many visible traces of human presence. What’s more difficult to picture is how the Firth looked during the Last Ice Age. Immeasurable tons of ice flowing out to sea, scraping away at the land. All vegetation, all animal and bird life, all traces of early human habitation erased. The islands and hills of today are what remain of larger geological forms eroded to stubs by glaciers.
It makes you feel small, thinking on this timescale, reflecting upon the massive impact of the ice on a landscape which you might assume is unchanging. I wanted to explore this feeling in a poem – a long poem, almost in essay form, which progresses incrementally and implacably. I was interested in how human history might be understood alongside a vaster geological history, not least because – from the point of view of an individual – the drawn-out events of human history can themselves seem like unstoppable forces.
Like an essay, my long poem ‘Glacier’ makes a lot of use of quotation. This was influenced by Marianne Moore’s marvellous poem ‘An Octopus’, about a glacier-topped mountain in North America. I like the instability created by the intrusion of other people’s words upon the poetic voice, and the frisson when terminology from other disciplines is put under pressure in a poem. Glaciers pick up all kinds of debris, from grit to huge boulders, finally depositing them far from their original context. I want the quoted phrases in my poem to be repositioned in a similar way.
Garry MacKenzie, Glacier
I know this last year has been a lot for many of us (personally, I’ve felt in some sort of crisis-mode since May 2024!) But I read the other day that the opposite of anxiety is creativity (I always thought it was calmness, as I am highly creative with my anxiety and worst-case scenarios!) But what the author shared was that we can take all those uncomfortable emotions and make something from them—write a poem, journal, paint something, or even string fairy lights in the laundry room just because. Make beauty where there wasn’t any. And I like that idea—leave the world a little better each day. Create when you can. […]
The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi — I just finished this book and I adored it! Gabrielle does something in these poems that reminds me why we read in the first place—to feeeeel (yes, with five e’s). If you’re someone who has one toe dipped in sadness, but who also walks through the world noticing the small miracles of being alive—this may be exactly the book you need right now. Its opening line is: The days I don’t want to kill myself are extraordinary. From there, the book keeps opening up into how temporary everything is, and yet somehow it keeps choosing wonder and finding joy. It’s my current favorite read—the book I keep returning to, the one that keeps returning to me.
Kelli Russell Agodon, My *Favorite Things* List
Publishing a chapbook starts with encountering a mind.
There’s a lot of poetry in the world that can take any shape or position. Authorial summary, imagist embroidery, foregrounding feelings or ironed down lessons, or poet voice’s uniform containment, unshaped lashing, formal, anarchist, anti-hierarchy, storytelling, language-y foregrounded.
Here was a mind questioning and admitting how things don’t quite reconcile. There’s the considered footstep of word choice, and risk of embedded emotions but an exploring mind as if talking to itself not performing an established script. This is a mind that can be self-deprecating. Observant, humble, vivid, self-questioning, That is an exciting brain.
At an open mic, Tamsyn’s poem (and I don’t recall which, it being a couple years ago) stood out in glittering neon sparkle of aha. What is this alert mind here? Hm, hm, think I might need to meet this person.
Could I see more poems?
These poems reflect a world of citizens I want to live in, to make more of. These are poems I can hear and feel. Ideas and posture relative to the world that make sense to me. Ones that take risk, that can sit with thoughts not all categorically pre-filed for the reader.
So, I got the poems, which I will then sit on as a dragon’s hoard. Read, rest, reread.
I look at line length, poem width and length, consider the potential size of container. Next or simultaneously: Looking at the poems as a critic, call out what is particularly fabulous and goosebump-making. Let it sit, reconsider.
Meanwhile I consider paper types, end paper mood-matches, cover stock options. What sort of cover image would complement the poems? Brainstorm that. Look and draw and make images. That’s a fun imagining stage.
While waiting considering paper stock, reconsider fonts. Doing a few layouts. Give suggestions for edits. Dialogue. Sending a proof of concept for approval and edits.
Pearl Pirie, Process of Chapbooks: for Farr’s
A couple of years ago, Joelle Taylor took part in the contemporary poetry archive project that I was involved in at the University of East Anglia. Her creative response to the project was “dust kings. tough kids”, a “queer crown of sonnets” written in memory of murdered butch women. Here is part of her note on the sequence:
While writing I stared at a cheap plastic snow globe that imprisoned a gold angel. Occasionally, gold glitter rained down on the angel. The snow globe was given to me in the early 1990s by my girlfriend’s brother, Richard. He was the first gay man I personally knew to die of AIDS, and he left behind him a collection of snow globes for the mourners to take home with them from his funeral. As I worked, I thought about the snow globe, about the idea of the vitrine in general, about emergency, about memory, safety, love, and friendship. This Crown of 15 Sonnets is written in response to the idea of the snow globe as an archive within itself.
“dust kings. tough kids” has now been republished as part of Maryville: 1957—2007 (Bloomsbury) […]
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #38: A Crop of Frost
When I first read Chaucer Cameron’s In an Ideal World I’d Not Be Murdered (Against the Grain, 2021) I was reminded of Mexican writer and activist, Cesar A. Cruz , who said ‘Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.’ In other words literature should provoke strong reactions, jolt the reader out of his/her complacency, force them to confront uncomfortable truths. Cameron does just that by taking us into the lives of women who work in the sex industry: prostitutes, cam girls, strippers.
She shows us that this is a world in which women are treated as an expendable commodity, their value dependent on their looks. In Erotic, a poem written from the point of view of a pole-dancer, she states: ‘ But here/ tonight/ a pint glass/ does the rounds,/ half full:/ loose change/ that clanks/ against the sides/ is a sign/ I’ve lost./ Skin no longer/ tight against my frame/ fixes me/ at half price./ Doesn’t it?’ The consequence of ageing is a drop in remuneration. There’s something tragic about a woman who describes herself in monetary terms, as ‘half price.’ Her job has undermined her self-image, her self-worth. This is developed further in the symbolic description that follows: ‘My dressing/ room/ has dwindled/ to toilet size./ No door locks/ grime-smeared/ floor tiles/ cracked.’ The squalidness of the environment and its comparison to a toilet suggests the humiliation she feels and the contempt with which she believes she is held. She also feels very vulnerable. Significantly there are ‘no door locks’: she is defenceless. Her position is a precarious one, subject to the whims of her employer. As a consequence we are told she ‘cower(s) in a corner/ until the owner comes to check.’ She goes on: ‘This time/ he shows pity,/ dresses me/ in finery./ takes me to his table’/ he likes/ the meat,/ the tuck, tuck/twist of me.’ The image ‘he likes the meat’ is shocking in its resonance with its associations of death, carnal appetite, and violence. This is a man who enjoys his life and death power over her: ‘He likes/ to see/ the light/ in my acid eyes/ go out/ just before/ they/ close.’
These notions of male power and exploitation permeate virtually every poem in this pamphlet.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘In Ideal World I’d not be Murdered’ by Chaucer Cameron
Bex Hainsworth is a poet whose work I’ve skirted the periphery of for a while, always enjoyably so. Circulaire has given me the chance to dive in and explore at greater depth, and I’m so glad I did. Hainsworth has been published in The Rialto, Poetry Wales and bath magg, among others. While her debut pamphlet, Walrussey, is described as ecopoetry, Hainsworth says of this collection, in an interview with Sam Szanto, “Circulaire is my confessional era”. Confessional feels right. The poems are corporeal, intimate; concerned with the domestic stage and the everyday dangers of being a woman.
The opening poem somehow reminded me of Colette, who, in her memoirs, gives us a poetic, personal ethnography of the domestic interior. Speaking of her grandmother’s ‘semi-detached’, Hainsworth says:
“It shook knitting needles
and ration books from its cellar,
ready for new visitations.”
(All houses are haunted by women)
A few poems in, in Arcs, she speaks of a first apartment;
“Tucked away in the hips
of a hollowed-out hosiery factory”
and
“the rosy bones of our chilly homes”
There is a repeated merging of the interior space of the home with the interior space of the child, then “almost-woman”. The poems loosely follow a narrative arc from childhood to adulthood, charting “the cycle of female experience” (another interview quote).
Victoria Spires, Tender excavations
I am poor and I owe
Luisa A. Igloria, Pauper’s Purse
an incalculable debt
to the world— I have taken
more than my share of what
it has given, and still
it does not begrudge another
chance to secure my so-called
fortune. […]
And I am rich with
a surplus, always, of feeling.
There is so much, I often
don’t know what to do with it;
and other times, it saves me
from thinking I am completely
bereft, empty as a pauper’s purse.
I came to the cafe thinking I would be able to tap into something creative and instead I found a (nother) way to self-critique. I need to try to use this as a spark (a cattle prod?) to inspire something more. Does this count as writing, this post wherein I complain about not being able to write? What would I tell my students?
I guess I’d remind them that writing is a muscle that you have to work regularly or else risk weakening. Not losing—you can always get it back—but it does get harder the longer you sit on your metaphorical butt.
I’d also tell them (and by extension, myself), not to be too hard on themselves. Life is hard enough. (Especially lately, good lord.) Be gentle. Give grace.
But also: get going.
Sheila Squillante, What Counts?
I cannot wait, I cannot wait, I cannot wait
until we can talk about all of this in the past tense
I cannot wait for these to be the old days
[…]This week I’m sharing this poem from a wonderful event we did together this month down at STATUS FLO at The Brighton Dome Studio Theatre. This regular poetry night is incredible, with fabulous curation and hosting by Aflo Poet, one of the UK’s rising superstar poets. The evening also featured poetry and vivid story-telling from the excellent Pablo Franco. Both of these poets delivered phenomenal sets and you should check them both out. This film of my poem was kindly sent to me by Gray Taylor. The night was electric, the audience so warm, responsive, which you might hear here, thank you to everyone there. Thank you for inviting me to join you.
Salena Godden, I Cannot Wait To Breathe
Best Small Fictions 2025 is now open for pre-orders on the Alternating Current Press website here. I’m thrilled to be included for the third time & in this 10th anniversary edition! Many thanks to Jeff Harvey’s Gooseberry Pie for nominating my Microfiction “After Reading A Newspaper Clipping Of Emily Dickinson’s Obituary Online” and to judge Robert Shapard for selecting it for inclusion. Thanks to the anthology editors and readers for their hard work. Congrats to my fellow flash writers. I can’t wait to have it in my hands! Please consider pre-ordering which determines the print runs. Thanks!
In other book news, I received my signed copy of Patti Smith’s new book, Bread of Angels, and look forward to beginning reading today. Two of her previous books are among my favorites, Just Kids and M Train. I’ve read them more than once which is a testament to how much I like them. Patti’s is the first Stack I subscribed to a few years ago. I really like her low-key impromptu videos that make me feel like we are having a chat about ordinary and extraordinary things. She spoke about this book as she wrote it so I know it will be brilliant reading. I’ll let you know what I think.
Charlotte Hamrick, Book News!
I have spent some time this morning listening to Patricia Smith’s acceptance speech for the National Book Award for poetry; another poet pasted it in a Facebook post. I went to the website where one could watch the whole ceremony (here), but instead, I’m listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Patti Smith–the more famous Patti Smith, the godmother of punk, the author of Just Kids, along with more recent books.
Back to the poet Patricia Smith, who was the only poet of all the nominees whose work I had read (go here for the full list). I hadn’t even heard of the poets nominated until they were nominated. Some years are like that. But happily, I have heard of Patricia Smith; I remember a presentation she did at an AWP conference, probably as far back as the one in D.C. in 2011. I probably wouldn’t have discovered her book Blood Dazzler on my own without hearing her talk about it at her presentation. It showed me what poetry could do, and I’m glad she’s now gained wider recognition for her poetry.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Various Patricia Smiths and Various Strands of a Life
A book which has been on my shelves forever is A Wild Patience Has Take Me This Far by Adrienne Rich. I’ve culled my books a number of times but this one remains. However, I hadn’t taken it off the shelf for ages. Lately I’ve been saying in my head a lot, I don’t really think I have the wild patience for this. But then I laugh and do the thing anyway. You know? Anyway the book’s title is the first line of a poem titled “Integrity.” In it she speaks of her selves being both “anger and tenderness.” She speaks of how the light is both critical and critical. In another poem she says, “If you can read and understand this poem / send something back…” I’ve always loved her poem “What Kind of Times Are These.”
Shawna Lemay, I’m Giving You a Free Pass (and a side of wild patience)
Once, in Spain, I saw a two pet meerkats on a lilo floating down a bright river, chattering loudly with what might have been excitement, or perhaps more likely, fear. Sometimes, in the bright, sociable suburbs of Perth, I feel like a meerkat on a lilo.
But when I walked into The Moon Café, with its long bar crowded with bottles, its stage and its rainbow flags, I found my footing again. And to open the reading, an Acknowledgement of and Welcome to Country which made me feel, for a moment, like we all belonged to this one moment in millennia of human history, to all the ages of this dizzingly ancient land.
More of that another time. Because now, I want to talk about quokkas.
And Cath Drake. Since the Moon Café, I’ve been reading her collection “The Shaking City” published with Seren in 2020. It’s unusually thick and accomplished for a first collection – and I read it slowly in these baking hot days of wild distractions. By the time I reach the second section – a sequence of fantastical and quotidian character portraits, each equally magical – I return to the first section, and find new narratives in each of the rich, dense yet accessible poems. It’s a collection which deserves to be more widely acclaimed – but it’s the third section – “Far From Home” – which comes alive for me in 30 degree heat, facebook full of pictures of the snow falling back home, Australian Ravens wailing like babies or peacocks, or mating cats, .
The day after the Cath Drake’s reading, I was due to visit Rottnest Island or Wadjemup, the Noongar name of the island. It’s referred as ‘the place across the water where the spirits are’ – the resting place of the spirits, as well as the bodies of the Aboriginal men and boys who died in the island’s prison and forced labour camps between 1838 and 1931.
In her reading, Cath described how significant the island is for anybody raised in Perth – how quickly and drastically it has changed; how she loves it regardless. I was only on the island for five hours, and my engagement was brief, shallow, and wildly enthusiastic. I loved the speed and breeze of cycling down its tracks and deceptive hills. I loved the snorkelling; the fish like silver flames, the shy and sandy flounder. I loved the white beaches, the rough vegetation, the peeling gum trees and the old buildings; the gulls and oystercatchers. But most of all, I love the quokkas, sleeping in the shade near the shops, climbing into unattended bags, begging under benches, stealing ketchup from our table.
Clare Shaw, The Strange and Shining.
It took several days for me to settle into a travel mode, and leave behind the sorrows and concerns of my daily life. I checked my messages, looked at the Guardian once a day, kept up with Duolingo (switching from Spanish to Italian), but I stayed away from social media and any threaded conversation scrolls, posting only a couple of pictures myself and one blog post. We ate out some, at pizzerias and simple trattorias, and we also cooked. At first I was unable to draw or write much, but eventually this loosened up and I managed to keep a basic written journal and worked in my sketchbook; every day, I looked for ideas for future paintings or writing.
We had a lot of remarkable experiences, and I’ll try to share some of them here as the next weeks unfold. I’ve come back feeling like the creative discouragement and inertia of the last few months has lifted, and I feel inspired to write and do artwork over the winter. This is a relief, and I hope it lasts. But in order to do that, I realize I have to be online less, to be less focused on political news, argument, and the negativity I can do nothing about, to say “no” a little more often, and to determinedly focus my energies and time on the areas where I can actually make a difference, both in my own life and in others’. Distraction is everywhere, and it’s there for a reason — and not a benign one. Resistance, on the other hand, also takes many forms. One is to set a meaningful direction for oneself, and stick to it. That’s never easy. It’s the path with greater challenge, and greater potential serenity too.
Beth Adams, Re-entry
Look at the airline staff: all yawns, blank, demoted
to rote smiles as they correct operating intelligence.Job description: To Oversee the Blundering
Machine. But as any parent knows, kids growcompetent; they turn 30, don’t need reminders
to pack and get going. The message is bright and bold:they are replacing us. But AI ain’t flesh and blood,
Jill Pearlman, The New Thanksgiving Travel
the workers’ smiles tell you that in one second.
I was thinking about how to make this season brighter—with all the political ugliness and Trump and his horrid party boys trying to kill the arts (defunding the NEA means a lot of presses and lit mags shutting down and struggling)—and I came upon this idea. If you have a favorite press or literary magazine—we may not be able to replace a $25K grant from the government, but maybe we can give a little and if it happens from many of us, it will be enough to count. I know a lot of us are struggling with money these days—more than usual, given the layoffs and the inflation—but giving during the holidays has always been a tradition that usually comes—not from the wealthy, not from the billionaires—but from the little people, from the middle class. There are a lot of people who don’t have enough to eat. Animal shelters need donations of pet food. Even cleaning out and donating from your pantry may do more good than you know.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, How to Give a Little, Making the Holidays Brighter…Literally
I know that it’s an incredibly challenging financial time for many, as prices continue to rise and economic inequality deepens. And, there are also so many worthy causes and organizations in need (and even more so with many ends to federal funding), but if you’re able (and don’t forget to ask if your employer offers matching donations) and so inclined, I’d like to offer a couple of ways you can support the arts this season.
First, Black Ocean, where I am editor, is celebrating its first year as a nonprofit publisher and about to celebrate 20 years in publishing in 2026, and is trying to raise money to meet its annual fundraising goal to support its books and translations. Find out more here.
Also, please consider supporting Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), where your gift will enable meaningful arts education partnerships for students, teachers, and teaching artists in Chicago and West Chicago. Find out more about their programs and how to donate here. (What’s more, your gift will be matched by the Wildflower Foundation.)
Carrie Olivia Adams, A Few Reasons for Gratitude
Happy Thanksgiving! Isn’t is amazing that we have a whole holiday dedicated to gratitude? (With a side of cranberry sauce.) There’s so much I’m grateful for, but a key element is the sense of purpose I gain from my Makino Studios work. It turns out that being an artist and poet doesn’t bring in the big bucks—who knew?! But unlike hedge fund managers, I get to regularly hear from people how much my offerings touch them.
This weekend a friend told me that one of my cards was perfect for a difficult situation: her brother is in his last weeks in hospice. Another wrote that she was so moved by a poem that she sent it on to family and friends. And there are hundreds of people who make a point of giving my haiku calendar to friends, family, book club members, caregivers and coworkers every year. It’s a real gift to have that impact as an artist and poet. Your support helps my dreams take wing, so thank you all!
Annette Makino, On grateful wings
it was snowing & the sky was bare.
Robin Gow, 11/22
we both stopped. no porch light,
just the glow of white snow lighting
our faces. maybe he saw the creature
staring down at us. maybe he was looking
at something else. i could not make out
the beast’s full body. eyes. claws.
wing tips like mountains.
the view from what happens decides there’s a road. or a fly
on the wall of winter. all things to be done will be done
over. the dark in a dog set to howl.
Grant Hackett [no title]