“More light and light—more dark and dark our woes!” says Shakespeare's insufferable but not incorrect Romeo to Juliet during their single dawn together. In this poem, I was channeling my own Juliet-of-the-aftertimes.Mary Szybist on "Aubade—" |
|
|
"A Conversation with Rachel Mannheimer"
"The laconic and the ironic are inseparable in Rachel Mannheimer's vivid debut, Earth Room. Crossing Montana, one poem ends: 'We were in the basin / of the Big Hole River but I don't know / about the hole itself, whether it was behind us.' Not only does it refuse the epiphanic ending, leaving us abruptly, but it dusts that suddenness with the irony of a 'big hole,' of any sort, in pandemic-era twenty-first century America."
via MCSWEENEY'S |
|
|
What Sparks Poetry:
Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nation, Alberta) on Ecopoetry Now
"On the coast of Lesser Slave Lake, some of the Canadian government's most brutal forms of colonial oppression played out. I wonder what it means for a lake to be witness to all of it. In a way, that trauma is inscribed in the lake's ontological fabric. But, more importantly, I see the lake as proof of my people's indomitability. The lake precedes the political project of Alberta, of Canada; it precedes the concept of the settler state. The lake has been and continues to be a locus of Cree livability." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
