When reading a new collection, I keep index cards handy and write down lines that strike me. Often I’m drawn to similar themes and textures, and turning them into a Cento feels organic. This poem features lines from Ross Gay, Ada Limón, Taylor Johnson, Caitlin Moran, Jericho Brown, Terrence Hayes, Franny Choi, and Ocean Vuong. I’m honored to stitch together the words of poets I admire and create something new.
Rage Hezekiah on "Cento for My Mother" |
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"Poem of the Week: Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar"
"But the constant narrative resistance in the poem signifies the difficulty not so much of making sense of a multilayered reality, as that of making sense of mystical experience. A bell doesn’t have grammar. To distinguish between a “real voice and the other kind” the mystic might have to force themselves to be innocent of language altogether, linguistic skill being no help in interpreting the unspeakable."
via THE GUARDIAN |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Lena Crown on Taneum Bambrick's Vantage
"No tagline could hold all that Bambrick has achieved: a sweeping portrait across time of a community beholden to a single, monumental piece of infrastructure, a queer coming-of-age, a specific yet universal story of ecological death and climate resilience. This is a landscape where the drowned and concealed do not stay that way; monoliths crack and water levels fall, revealing what we’ve jettisoned, sacrificed, tolerated into obscurity." |
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