Each Wednesday, Editor's Choice brings you a poem from a new book selected as a must-read. Our feature editor this week is Sally Keith.
Catherine Barnett
Mostly I'd like to feel a little less, know a little more.
Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.
Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord
to keep it from fraying?
Not the man who called my life a debacle,
a word whose sound I love.
In a debacle things are unleashed.
Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.
I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate,
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing.
They don't use words, but they can be said to love.
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it's called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare,
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I'm alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.
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Photograph of Marie Ponsot
"Poet of Love, Family and Divorce"

Marie Ponsot, who died aged 98 on July 5, translated dozens of books, published seven volumes of poetry, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, taught at Queens College and served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2010 to 2014. Yet she also stopped publishing for nearly a quarter a century.

via NEW YORK TIMES
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What Sparks Poetry:
Yona Harvey on Sonia Sanchez’s
"Summer Words of a Sistuh Addict"

"How is it that we come to know this young sistuh so intimately? There’s her cool revelation that shooting up actually felt “gooooood” and “gooder than doin it” and that she wants to “do it again.” There’s no shame in her sexuality or her “remembered high.” We come to learn all these details, but never through the lens of exploitation, sensationalism, or judgment. This is because Sanchez never intrudes on the poem. The explicit “i” narrator does not exist in this poem. A lesser poet would relish some kind of confession or faux street credibility for witnessing. But Sanchez’s poem is the anodyne for voyeurism. "

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