C Minor
Percival Everett
1

Still hunting requires patience, quiet, and,
above all else, prey. How long is the rule of
death? How long is a moment? Time still hunts
us, does it not? In this stew of motion.


2

As if by some whistle signal they let us in,
Let us hang around like possible members or
definite victims. A reminiscence must be,
necessarily, as long as the event remembered.


3

Conjure and construct, you told me
while we waited in our blind, laughed when
we imagined a blind that afforded

no sight of our prey, fleeting at best,
shifting, pushing, crawling, spiraling into
view, into range, into focus, then gone.
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"‘Out of the Vortex’: David Jones’s Parenthetical Epic"

"The bewildering effect of the poem is due in equal measure to its verbal density, its narrative techniques, and its lack of a clear point of view. It is polyphonic, with many voices interjecting and overlapping, forming a kind of chorus. Most of the time it’s hard to tell who is speaking. Jones also uses the second-person pronoun (“You feel exposed and apprehensive in this new world”), especially in the poem’s final section, which conscripts the reader into a field of fluid intersubjectivity."

via COMMONWEAL MAGAZINE
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Cover of Joyelle McSweeney's Death Styles
What Sparks Poetry: Joyelle McSweeney on "Death Style 2.8.21 (Mary Magdalene, Collectible Glasses)"

I wrote all the poems of Death Styles on the shockwave of catastrophic grief, trying to understand the physics of my new, confounding planet, a planet clammy with calamity, with weed beds and reed beds, NICU wards, of cause decoupled from event. I think of irreparability, a loss that runs only one way, converting my skull to a locked vault, a cave. Can you witness absence? How does the individual body, immobilized by calamity, become a place to which sound and consequence flood?”

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