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Jen Levitt
Today it's the boy on the train
in a royal blue wind-
breaker & tennis shoes
tapping his foot
to whatever breezy melody
loose-limbed like a cross-country champ
& quiet as a nail
part of me will always envy
a faded button-down
full of possibility
how the light before dusk
borders a boy
I prefer the boy half
of the catalogue
the boy half of my body
the way my chest would look
without breasts
show me a hero
sandwich piled with meats
a boy's confidence
like adult teeth
how a boy doesn't need
to glance behind him at night
since he cultivates
a smile with wingspan
I've spent too much of my life
extracting loose hair from the drain
re-reading every text
I've ever sent
worried about excess
& the right way to ask for more
no woman I know isn't trying
to make of her body
something better
a blade sharp or weightless
while deep in the woods
a boy who has worked all day
sleeps under stars
devoted to nothingness
& the rain about to fall
from the book SO LONG / Four Way Books
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Cover of "To 2040" & Headshot of Jorie Graham
"Jorie Graham : To 2040"

"[T]here was still so much left to explore about Jorie Graham's poetics, which makes her return to Between the Covers, to discuss her latest collection, To 2040. ...Today's conversation is about the body—the body in relation to self and other; the body politic in relation to truth, fact, and shared reality; and the body that is the planet we call home. The body in relation to the virtual, the body in relation to language, and how to find a language in a world where we've lost our way."

via TIN HOUSE
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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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