Annelyse Gelman
At dawn the bugs died down and the birds started up
The dog stared at a photograph of a forest like it was a window
Willows along the canal were smothered in something cotton candy–esque
A dense tangle of orbs and cobs and sheets
Beings decomposed and became other beings
At dusk the bugs started up and the birds died down

Creamy pudding, someone wrote, regarding knowledge
Mown clover augmented redundant smells
People in movies confused her, they always had something to say
A figure’s hand was still encased in the marble block
A scheme always failed if you watched it being hatched
The formula made drama a foregone conclusion

The specialist put sharp metal into daughter’s arm
The specialist put soft plastic down her throat
The specialist put piezoelectric crystals onto her wrists
The specialist put her head in a sound like a propeller
Falling out of the sky and into a municipal swimming pool
Not otherwise specified, said the specialist

A person wearing gloves kept saying attachment
Porous daughter, who couldn’t domesticate her noticing
They would take her from me and put her in a home
She would lie on ironed sheets until she had no personality
Like that woman who couldn’t pour a cup of tea
Because it was frozen, like a glacier

The dominant metaphor for the body was the engine
The dominant metaphor for the city was the body
The dominant metaphor for identity was consumption
Sometimes a brain got too big, holes had to be drilled
To make room, I committed the first page of the economics textbook to memory
People always want more, no matter how much they have already
from the book VEXATIONS / University of Chicago Press
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In this episode of "Vexations": A memory of a tree in Berlin. An obsession with the word creamy. Teaching to Transgress. Ars poetica. Narrative tropes. "Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine." A psychedelic and invasive encounter with the mental health industrial complex. Girl, Interrupted. Patient L.M. High school econ. Individuals shedding their origins! The formation of ecologies! Disloyal attention that is always cutting away.

Annelyse Gelman on "Vexations"
Cover of Franny Choi's latest book of poetry, The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On
"On Hope, Mystery, and Friendship"

Poet Franny Choi cleaves to the value of hope for an artist. "What makes a hope a world-opening, powerful force is fighting to show up to it again and again, despite all the signs that things are hopeless. That, to me, is when hope actually matters. That, to me, is why it’s useful to think of hope as a discipline, because a real engagement with hope requires showing back up to the table again and again. Even when things aren’t going well."

via WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW
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Cover image of Chris Dombrowski's book, Ragged Anthem
What Sparks Poetry:
Chris Dombrowski on "Just a little green, like the nights when the northern lights perform"

"From my seat alongside Rattlesnake Creek, I looked upstream toward the high-elevation wilderness snowfields that framed and fed the floodplain. The water at my feet had once resided there, and before that it existed as moisture trapped inside a cloud, and perhaps before that as fog, the slough’s breath, the valley’s exhalation, ad infinitum."
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