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Editor's Choice brings you a poem from a new book selected as a must-read. Our feature editor today is Brian Teare.
Fred Moten
in the color field there's
blood at the root. our
schedule is everyday
sunshine blood, every
dead nigger on the street
in every record spinning
around, every last one
whirling. that's what
every record records
in the blue they see.
which one of you
motherfuckers can see
and can't see that? black
arts vs. black abstraction
is a lie again and again,
like you get not to see
all that brutality in all
that blue. you don't get
to not see, motherfucker,
but what happens when you
act like you do? somebody
black and poor can't
breathe, everybody dying
of their dying breath,
nobody laying with them
on the ground, all of us
all fucked up with our
phantom child, and
you get to act like you
alive in a brutal gallery?
from the book PERENNIAL FASHION   PRESENCE FALLING / Wave Books
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"Sandra Lim Wins Jackson Poetry Prize"

"In identifying Lim as this year's winner, the judges issued a citation that reads, in part: 'It's tempting to think of Sandra Lim as a philosopher poet, in the school of Marcus Aurelius—her poems address the conundrum of being a self with fears and feelings in spite of the mortality that should in theory put us at ease. Wielding a striking combination of cool detachment and sly humor, Lim constantly points to the mundane aspects of the world and to how we nevertheless cling to them, always expecting something more.'"

via POETS & WRITERS
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What Sparks Poetry:
Melissa Kwasny on "Sleeping with the Cedars"


"Most of us are frightened of the future and grief stricken at what humans have done to the earth. As I see it, one of the unique tasks of poets, especially at this time, is to be in imaginative relation with the Earth. And to use language as a tool toward that effort. To have an imaginative—as opposed to an abstract or intellectual—relationship with the earth is to be in attendance to what Denise Levertov called 'other forms of life that want to live.'"
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This April, to celebrate National Poetry Month, we'll share popular writing prompts from our "What Sparks Poetry" essay series each morning. Write along with us!

Write a poem in which remembered images of particular moments, people, or things alternate or converse with passages of historical fact, violent events, or intellectual propositions. Make what you remember detailed, sensuous, and so alive even you forget it is gone. If you can, let the poem also remind us that when language is working best it is also always failing.
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