Nicole Brossard doesn’t write in autobiographical detail, although the speaker of this poem is surely writing out of her personal observations of the religiously devout. She notes appearance and speech, and highlights the irony that their “spat-out words” produce “such a big fire.” This elliptical poem is part of a series of evocative distillations of postmodern urban life in Distantly, with a sharp awareness of social, cultural and gendered histories of violence and beauty.
Cynthia Hogue on "Cities with their fools for God" |
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A Conversation with Robert Wood Lynn
"I didn't set out to do this, but I felt like breaking out of punctuation allowed me to unleash a voice that I was trying to channel. Mothman is so different from How To Maintain Eye Contact—I feel like they’re written by different people. In Mothman, I was trying to channel the voice I had when I was 19 or 21, and I was a very different human being back then."
via Washington Square Review |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Christine De Luca on Jidi Majia’s “The Enduring One”
"Reading the poem I was given, ‘The Enduring One’, I sensed a flavour of the Old Testament books of Genesis and Proverbs, of Norse sagas, of the Finnish Origin stories as told in the Kalevala. There was the same sensual lyricism, the fabulous nature of the tales and the sheer urgency of telling. Also the sense of long kinship, the importance of genealogy and the need to remember, especially heroic forebears." |
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