Carlina Duan
now my dress smells like rain & all day long: I've been
eager to get back to my book. a novel about a young
couple making pasta & falling into one another's
skin. an Irish novel, with names of cities that clunk
around in my mouth — cities I'd never heard of
but now ride my skull like pleasant, individually-
wrapped candies, words with strange cactus-like
shapes, words I star: Sligo. Carricklea. I turn
the page. my mind goes: stick, stick, stick,
my brain goes hungry for more. today I run
through the rain in my wooden clogs & pleasure
at the sound: thump, thump, thump, the entire
green world of a street flashing down an open
sewer drain. So alive! I think, then
remember what else makes me possible: public
libraries. cartilage. a good hardcover. a prayer
I overhear my cab driver mumble while
passing by a full school bus. goose bumps I get
from reading my old journal, one sentence,
another: My heart is a skull zone (did I really
write that?) — & oh, I am possible again. I am
a fragrant, silly self. today, I thank
the worms who eat the dirt who
break down the soil who make
the lilacs possible and young, forever
purpling, forever cradled in my palms as I cross
Blakemore Avenue and it rains, rains, rains, and I
think about eating up the alphabet, which has
made a city into a word into a sound: Sligo,
which slides, slinky-like, into my brain,
the dear alphabet which has made me
into a woman who will cross the street
and love the lilacs and treasure the strange
turn of the day, the strange turn of
a word, a sentence, a curve and a stroke
of black ink that — thank you — brought me here.
from the book ALIEN MISS / University of Wisconsin Press
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I wrote this poem while emerging from a long sad spell, during a season where I found myself re-encountering tenderness in rain, clogs, alphabet songs and, yes, Sally Rooney's novels. This is a poem to honor the feeling of making (and re-making) space. A poem to honor all textures of joy, however tiny.

Carlina Duan on "Possible"
"Louise Gluck’s First Collection Since Her Nobel"

"The poems are elegiac, brooding and death-obsessed, haunted by intimations of mortality, by ghosts facing backward with regret and forward with trepidation. It is an end-of-life book, where the life in question could be anyone's: the poet's, the reader's, the planet's."

via THE WASHINGTON POST
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What Sparks Poetry:
Alyse Knorr On John Keats' "Bright Star"

"I loved picturing the star in the poem watching the waves clean the shores and the snow graze the mountaintops. I loved how the first half of the poem painted a picture by negation, like a puzzle, and how it wrenched me from the cold, lonely reaches of outer space down to the grounded, intimate moment of laying one's head on a lover's breast and hearing the quiet of her breathing: all made equally sacred in the poem's grand equation."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
18th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival
January 10-15, 2022

We are pledged to create an extraordinary week of virtual poetry workshops and events for you in the safety of your home.
 
Workshop Faculty: Kim Addonizio, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Chard deNiord, Mark Doty, Yona Harvey, John Murillo, Matthew Olzmann and Diane Seuss. One-On-One Conferences with Lorna Blake, Sally Bliumis Dunn, Nickole Brown, Jessica Jacobs, and Angela Narciso Torres. A special Craft Talk by Kwame Dawes. Special Guest Poet: Yusef Komunyakaa. Poet-at-Large: Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
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