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J. Estanislao Lopez
Bought with the soiled coins
I pinched from the floorboard of our father's truck,
my sister's sparkler fell into her sandal.

Below her body,
light pooled against desert night—

a coincidence of beauty and suffering,
which I would learn is an old coincidence.

Old, too, a boy's hands placed
on the causal chain.

My mother smothered the glowing lace,
first with her hands,
then with a towel my brother fetched.

Fireworks continued.

Horned lizards skittered beneath wood pallets.
I sunk behind our Dodge, and, as my sister cried out

to a luminous sky I then believed was listening,
I buried my legs in gravel,
counting seconds between its shifts of hue.

After the fireworks, gunfire resounded,
continuing through my sleep. I dreamt explosions
turning milky, flooding the desert,

saturating it—

our feet steeped in the milk, my sister's and mine
together. Then, others' feet: our countrymen,

who pledged this precise disaster:
that for her woundedness she'd be remembered,

for her woundedness she'd be loved.
from the book WE BORROWED GENTLENESS / Alice James Books
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This poem begins the body of my collection, "We Borrowed Gentleness." I placed it there because of how the philosophical, political, and familial click into place with one another. Our lives continually present us with obvious and subtle moments of allegory. Unpacking that allegorical richness in a way that still makes room for mystery and uncertainty is one of the difficult tasks of poetry. I hope I do so here.

J. Estanislao Lopez on "Independence Day in West Texas"
Cover image of Antonio Gamoneda's Book of the Cold
"On Antonio Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold"

"With his echo of Virgil’s Georgics in the title of the first section, Gamoneda writes, 'Sometimes I see the mountain radiance above the great sadness machines,' and furthermore, 'Immensity is short on meaning below the silent eagles.' These two excerpts create a tension that is central to the book. The radiance is dimmed by the materialistic view of the world, the faith in machines, technology and the false idea that history is progressive."

via HEAVY FEATHER REVIEW
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Cover image of Amelia Rosselli's L'Opera Poetica
What Sparks Poetry:
Deborah Woodard on Amelia Rosselli's "The Dragonfly"


"What I hope comes through in my and Roberta Antognini’s translation of this passage is the obsessive insistence with which Rosselli demands we search for and find Ortensia, and how equally insistently the text embodies a desire that is somehow delicate, hermetic and insatiable by turns. Rosselli takes the onanistic, gratingly abrupt though brilliant original and gives it a brand new lyrical body along with a new subjectivity to inhabit that body."
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