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A Glacial Oil World
dg nanouk okpik
A gray-black storm lies low, above the sea.
A 78 mile per hour windchill shatters any
water into icebergs, as I drown in my own element.
Rustling waves rolling me back to this massive
breakup outside and in. It glides past me blue-green,
blue-turquoise, collisions of pinnacles and pressure
points, which pinch. Volcano ash, radiation and
chemo ruin the physical. Old frozen cliffs, hoarfrost
lungs, clefts of monastic bergs adrift. I cough, cough
up bowels of human limits of sanity, sounds of gale
winds rifting the clapboard house I call home, as my
lungs carry my brain; carry my heart, and innards,
hands and feet; I hand palm the distance of sky and light.

Cut Yukon salmon
In my eyes, the river flows
The scent of burnt birch
from the journal ACTION BOOKS BLOG
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Color photograph of a mural depicting Gabriela Mistral as a counter-culture icon
"Young Chileans Have a New Favorite Poet"

The poet Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945. "Long depicted in fusty garb and known for writing poems about children, Mistral is being reclaimed by a new generation of feminist and L.G.B.T. activists as an anti-establishment icon—and igniting a debate about how we appropriate literary figures from the past."

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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Color image of the cover of the journal Aufgabe, 10
What Sparks Poetry:
Andrew Zawacki on Sébastien Smirou's "The Lion"


"The orthodox part of the evening once completed, we turned to our current project—very much under construction—namely, the English translation of Sébastien’s sophomore book, a bestiary titled Beau voir....The plan was Sébastien’s, inspired tangentially by the so-called 'torture test' that Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alferi had devised, which involved translating Robert Duncan’s falconer-mother back and forth between English and French, so the original would bloom anew through its successive degradations."
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