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Rupa Gosvami
Translated from the Sanskrit by Shannan Mann
i.

his honey-song flute — the muse
that maddens her mind

ii.

his heart is hurricaned
with her smell

iii.

everything he does
                dancing      cowherding      laughing
is a hook to catch the minnow of her heart

iv.

he pools to butter
                in the burning
palm of her pride

v.

he is dominated
                by the shadow
of envy pirouetting
                through her eyebrows

vi.

his mouth waters
                for the curses flowing
from her lips

vii.

the moonlight of his face
                emboldens the ocean
of her love with great tidal waves

viii.

he is the sapphire choker
                starred around her neck

ix.

he is the bumblebee
                at the dark lotus
of her mouth lapping
                the pollen of her tongue

x.

his monsoon chest
                brims with raindrops
of musk from her breasts
from the journal POET LORE 
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The love between Radha and Krishna is immortalized across India through all varieties of artforms. Sanskrit poetry, however, is emblematic of the magic of language — how it flows in a measured line, coalescing with both the devotional and the erotic but never diving into either wholly, always remaining ethereal to subjectivity. Often, each word can mean many different things — more if you untangle the roots. Ultimately, love is the last. 

Shannan Mann on "Radha's Mad Heart"
A Graphic of Money
"Edgar Kunz on Making Ends Meet As a Poet"

"It's taken me a long time to realize that my great subject, my first and most lasting obsession, is money. What we have to do to get it, how both having and not having twists us up. My first book, for all its obvious themes of masculinity and quiet suffering—for all its 'grit'—is really about money. When I write about strapping a free armchair to the roof of my friend's stepdad's van, I’m writing about money."

via LIT HUB
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Cover of Voyager
What Sparks Poetry:
Jacob Sheetz-Willard on Srikanth Reddy's Voyager


"Reading Reddy's collection, for me, has a similar effect. In repeating Waldheim's language but stripping back the rhetoric, he insists on a distinction between sound and significance—what's said and what we can intuit beneath the public performance of language. His poetry offers a lesson in the imaginative potential of erasure and the politics of silence."
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