This section from "Cataloguing Pain as Marriage Counseling" is one of several prose poems that stand alone on the page but work together to navigate how chronic illness and pain thread through a marriage. In marriage and in the body, pain transcends the physical and weaves through generations. I'm obsessed with the challenge of understanding and being understood, obsessed with the intricacies of empathy and conflict within families.
Allison Blevins on "Cataloguing Pain as Marriage Counseling" (excerpt) |
|
|
"Copy and Paste: On Poetic Theft"
"I love this idea that an act of appropriation and reframing can function as 'discovery,' offering a critical perspective on the concept of colonization. It tips the power dynamic upside down in a way that seeks to return collective power to the oppressed. It's brave, if a bit cheeky, and ultimately seeks to move the dial towards justice. I'm on board with this approach, especially as it applies to writing produced by white travel writers and Christian missionaries intent on continuing centuries of indoctrination in the global South."
via POETS & WRITERS |
|
|
What Sparks Poetry:
Emily Tuszynska on "Floodplain"
"Like Shepherd, I too was aware of myself as connected to the world in profound interdependence, an understanding that philosopher and biologist Andreas Weber refers to as 'enlivenment.' Every living thing around me had been animated by the same irresistible force, a 'wordless insistence' to which my body was now yielding, 'bowing / then kneeling / to each contraction as it came.' The force that was driving my daughter into the world was the same force that drove the tulip poplar's leaves to burst from their buds and their winged seeds to root themselves in the soil." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
