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Daniel Schonning
"Place cannot be body," writes Aristotle,
". . .qua containing, it is different from the matter." He's
restating one of Zeno's paradoxes. Put
simply: the cicada's shell is not
the insect, even while it's worn. But what you and I
understand, reader, is that places makes a body. The
vesper iris is named not only for
when it blooms, but also where—along the marble
xyst of a far-off monastery, its blue lips
yawn open (for a moment) to receive the evening prayer. Are its dark inner folds place?
Its green stalk?
Zeno would say no. In his vision of place, nothing grows; a child walking home never
arrives; arrows stall and dissolve mid-flight—their ghosts thickening the summer air like
birdsong. But, reader, we know the world to be otherwise. See how the Kentucky
warbler's brittle
clutch of new-laid eggs curls opposite the nest's round palm. Who first
drew together the debris of a space—bound the
even-threaded twigs and pale strips of bark, the dry
ferns and
grasses—into a world-made womb? Who chose the first lonely crook of
hawthorn or honeysuckle on which to settle and create?

I must stop to tell you, reader, as I've only
just learned: If a cowbird lays its eggs in that same nest, a
Kentucky warbler will simply build another over top.
Left underneath, the eggs—warbler and cowbird, both—
might yet hatch, might tremble and call out. But they have already ceased to be bodies.
Now, in their dark net of tree and reed, they are part
of place—are only womb through which the next clutch comes.
from the journal THE CAROLINA QUARTERLY
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"Birdsong" is part of a manuscript-in-progress that thinks deeply on the alphabet. As an abecedarian, the poem uses a fixed sequence of letters as its container, and so moves in content toward questions of etymology, philology, and—as "word" opens to "world"—ontology. Writing this poem felt like an act of discovery; I did my best to leave that experience transcribed in the finished piece.
 
"Four Poets Write New Histories"

"'Every poem is the story of itself,' Smith writes. The stories her poems tell share a number of preoccupations—history and grief, motherhood and mythology, art and identity, internal life and outer space—that traverse her four previous collections, excerpted here along with a section, 'Riot,' made up of new poems."

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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What Sparks Poetry: 
A Short List of Books Ilya Kaminsky Loved in 2021

"Kevin Young's music can be erotic, it can be surreal, it can be serious, revelatory, or playful, or all of this at once: 'Where the train once rained / through town / like a river, where the water // rose in early summer / & froze come winter— / where the moon // of the outhouse shone / its crescent welcome, / where the heavens opened // & the sun wouldn't quit— / past the gully or gulch / or holler or ditch // I was born.' Stones is a gorgeous book. No one writes like Kevin Young. Frankly, no one can."  
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