Editor's Choice brings you a poem from a new book selected as a must-read. Our feature editor today is Phillip B. Williams.
Elena Karina Byrne
beneath barbwire
                                like bedsprings during night-climbs      wet crop dirt under
my shirt      saving babies in the dark slide of building’s vents into canvas
flap backs of trucks        a chaos of fleeing.     Tell me, isn’t that art? 

An in-crisis or crime-pull toward & away from. Color block       lines
moving toward & away:       painting is a leavetaking.        Death is
a leavetaking.      Fleeing, great grandfather     out of fear    changed his
name with his family’s country      confounded something that is still
missing there where I see a truck that fell from the eroded cliff before
I was born       an indivisible ocean &     hill    bitten by cactus needles
fennel weed like language in an unbroken string-cruelty of color      too far
away to see     yet look at all disquiet-pictures that fall into our laps       Three

times the head of the dead        daily coming blur-back out of history’s chaos
like hairpins falling from pine trees       or dried blood hemming the floor
edge of your bedroom’s closed door      the same child’s tongue-color of
                                                                                                                   final rust.
from the book IF THIS MAKES YOU NERVOUS / Omnidawn
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As with many artists in this book of ekphrastic weaves, I was first introduced to Gerhard Richter’s work when I was a child. His overlaying abstract paintings, early “blur” works, his memento mori paintings, and Cage paintings, all imply motion and emotional impermanence for me—a perfect musical in-road for my childhood WWII repeating dream, providing the associative leap I was looking for, what he might call “chance results.” Italicized lines belong to the artist.

Elena Karina Byrne on "REALITY MAY STILL BE UNACCEPTABLE GERHARD RICHTER: A REPEATING DREAM I'M BELLY-DOWN AT ELEVEN"
Black-and-white headshot of Elisa Gabbert
"On Disrupting Your Process"  

Poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert reflects on her latest work. "People say, 'Trust the process,' but you can start to trust the process too much. You know what I mean? I was trying to disrupt the process so that I didn’t trust it anymore so I could have that feeling of, 'I don’t know if this is going to work out. I’m winging it.'"

via THE CREATIVE INDEPENDENT
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Cover image of Marie-Claire Banquart's book, Toute Minute est Premiere
What Sparks Poetry:
Jody Gladding on Marie-Claire Bancquart 's [—What did you say?  Lost empires,]

"Bancquart’s poems are spare, grounded, and, for all their attention to demise, surprisingly light. Just the thing for a pandemic. This poem with its 'lost empires' and 'catastrophes' counterbalanced by a shrinking soap bar seemed particularly suited to the moment. I was struck by Bancquart’s vertiginous shifts in scope/scale, producing the same effect they do in cartoons—making us laugh."
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