My mother dislikes this poem because it paints her as a bad parent and because the scene at the end of the poem never happened. This poem was first published in Quarterly West and was selected by Cate Marvin for inclusion in Best New Poets 2019.
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Narco-Poetics with Arthur Kayzakian & Azad Ashim Sharma
"The linear narrative doesn’t apply to my life, and it took me a while to accept that. Relapse occupies this special place in the book. It begins there, really, with double movements, the backtracking of a period of progress in sobriety and then in the strange forgetfulness addicts suffer from, making the same choices expecting different results, etcetera. That double movement is what, for me, characterizes the voice I was exhuming and exorcising from my real-life experiences into a portrait of the fraught addict in recovery."
via THE RUMPUS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Ian U Lockaby on Edward Salem's "Fullness"
"In Edward Salem’s poem “Fullness,” thought is derailed, not from the first instant but nearly, and in each subsequent instant the poem expands and contracts simultaneously in a dissent against time and space, as it leads us to a divine, non-existent anal inner mountain, where there is nothing (and everything) to be seen (at once). Operating intertextually with a Godhead in its poetics of negation, the poem manages, paradoxically, to build possibility through its persistent negations. Each time a line of argument becomes discernable, it’s quickly and forcefully wrought back around its own tail, creating coils of energy in refusal." |
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