Editor's Choice brings you a poem from a new book selected as a must-read. Our feature editor today is Susan Tichy.
Adrian Lürssen
 
All I need is the sound of their footsteps
To tell forever which directions they took
—Apollinaire, “Procession”
I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom. The dead
looked like pictures of the dead and even then

under a continual threat of being overwhelmed once again. When
pregnant women stand still, bathed in window light,

intently reading letters, where is one invited to imagine
the letters are coming from? Does a schoolyard really matter?

It was capacious, soft and reassuring; it radiated the same repose
we had observed in her face: morbid fascination of dirt, blood,

snakes, insects, smell, ugliness, deformity, size, and all that is grotesque
everywhere evident in the book. But we are warned that she has

premonitory dreams of attendance at the coming centenaryof the secret Society of Ghosts. Reaching the field, I watched our local

Interahamwe drill. They began shouting and waving their hoes around.
Birds everywhere as well as garlands, bouquets of flowers. She believes

in the coexistence of three different yet related worlds. However, I wasn't going
into any of these. Well, I am not going to. The more complete figures

looked a lot like people, which they were once. They did not smell.
from the book HUMAN IS TO WANDER / Colorado State Center for Literary Publishing
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"Procession" exemplifies many questions of voice—of giving voice during times of war and catastrophe—registered in Lürssen’s debut collection, "Human is to Wander." Comprised of lines collaged from numerous sources—including reportage of the Rwandan genocide of the early 1990s and Lawrence Weschler’s remarkable essay on the paintings of Jan Vermeer and their connection to the murderous dissolution of Yugoslavia—the poem asks “where is one invited to imagine/ the letters are coming from?”—which the book then attempts to answer…

Adrian Lürssen on "Procession: Firsts & Lasts, by Ones & Threes, in the Schoolyard of Ghosts"
Abstract image of words in lines, black on cerise
"On Prose Poetry and the Beauty of a Single Sentence"  

"Yet I’ve learned that the borders between modes and genres of writing are often the richest for experimentation and growth. I started writing prose poems to understand both prose and poetry, and yes, to acknowledge their shared dependence upon the sentence. Like so much of my reading and writing life, I found what I sought in literary magazines."

via LITHUB
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What Sparks Poetry: Daniela Naomi Molnar on "chorus 27 / Ojito Canyon / what consoles does wondering console"

"Poetry is borne of an elemental urge to connect with the deep time wildness of language. Like a poem, language is an ecosystem, made of the same stuff we’re made of, which is the same stuff the planet is made of. To speak a word, we move air through the fiery earth of our body, from the wet inside skin of lungs out through the watery trachea by the muscled earthwater of the tongue."
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