Victoria Stitt
it's too early for the birds' song,
for their misshapen truths.

i am still here
in morning

wounds unpeeled, where
the shadow of an image dances—

a dead line, bent by
the oak's snapped bark,

a call dropped
when the nascent navy sky cracked.

i look for my mother
and see her swallowing a wad of gnats

my grandmother clasps her hands
in prayer. the trees— the eyes

of ancestors, the
fish in the pond— whistle.
from the journal THE CAROLINA QUARTERLY
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How does the poet wake up their speaker? In this poem, I barely do. Instead, I give into their resistance, to their voice that rests in an unknowable but feelable place. When I think of dreamscapes, I imagine a world in between: dreams and landscapes, where the living and the dead meet. Where are the mothers from before? They aren't gone, so where are they? This poem seeks not to answer but to give image to that feeling of not knowing. 

Victoria Stitt on "maternal landscape"
Black-and-white headshot of Ukrainian poet, Lyuba Yakimchuk
"Ukrainian Poet Lyuba Yakimchuk Reflects on War"

"A major theme of Yakimchuk's poetry is what happens to language in wartime. 'Language is as beautiful as this world. So when someone destroys your world, language reflects that,' she said. In her poem decomposition, the names of places like Luhansk, Donetsk, and her hometown of Pervomaisk literally fall apart." 

via CBC
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EcoPoetry Now: March 7 

Read the first essay in our upcoming What Sparks Poetry series tomorrow. Poets from Canada, Mexico and the United States highlight poetry's integral role in building an ecological imagination that is most alive when biologically, culturally and linguistically diverse.
Cover of Hoa Nguyen's book, A Thousand Time You Lose Your Treasure
What Sparks Poetry:
Dujie Tahat on Hoa Nguyen's A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure


"Nguyen magnificently opens us up in an almost tessellation-like effect, zooming in in order to zoom out. In reading A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, I was often reminded of Denise Levertov’s 'Accuracy is always the gateway to mystery.' However, Nguyen provides—to this reader, at least—not just mystery, but a new orientation towards lyric."
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