Trevor Ketner
If we think of it as a door, the room it opens
into is a walk-in closet with dresses and suits.
There are ways of cutting things out: a small knife,
a surgery behind a curtain, then the heal.
One imagines balance as a kind of inaction,
getting things to settle and leaving them. And it is,
for a while—my mother asks about my boyfriend
but I don't tell her about my floral dresses.
For Halloween I went as an icon, panty hose
already with a run in it, tip of bowler, bustier,

and the highest heels I've ever seen. Turning

my ankle I couldn't walk, even barefoot afterward.
Cause: queerness. Effect: a subtle rippling
then a stillness. I would wipe the slate clean
but the slate is a cheese grater—I would clean the slate
like the whiteboard in class: Your assignment
is to be everything. Simple enough really, expectation
being only the act of doing the thing one does.
I think we will know how much a word weighs
someday, science being what it is—feather
to the heart's red brick, quiet pillars, scale.
from the book [WHITE] / University of  Georgia Press
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Phoebe Giannisi's Cicada Reviewed by Heather Green

"A contemporary Greek writer steeped in Classical Greek culture, Giannisi describes cicadas' apparition, flight, and sounds, while also drawing on the insect's appearances in poetry and its archetypal connections to summertime and myth. A heightened sense of wonder, borne from a recognition of the transitory nature of life itself, pervades this collection." 

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Chantal Neveu (Montreal) on EcoPoetry Now


"And when one takes last enough time, something can happen, an event, a sequence — unexpected. This phenomenon, without precedent, makes possible so much. To persist. Vibrate. Move. Resist. Founder. Transform. Separate. Shine — or not. In the breath of words are sounds, sensations, thoughts, meanings, objects, actions, passions, questions — random, rendered, phrased, fractals, ellipses, textualities, poems."
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