There is a brief hour
before I cover the nakedness of my head
when I am myself alone, the angles
of my face strange and warped
in the mirror. I don't recognize
who I am without the camouflage
of a wig anymore. I touch her hair,
I am wooed by the softness of what
was grown for me by another host,
something dead still merging
me with another—the one who was
my surrogate, eating in a different room,
wrapping her newly bare skull
with a printed cloth. I dress in darkness, then
stitch another woman to my body.
from the journal SOUTHERN REVIEW
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Photo of a man in a field after the sun set
Charif Shanahan Interviewed By Chen Chen

“I genuinely do not think of myself as 'writing poems about my mother.' I am writing poems about systems, about the structures in which we live that would generate, in the first place, such an interpersonal possibility as the one that exists between the speaker and the mother figure in this book. It’s less about them, and more about how they could come to exist in this world at all and what that means for all of us. " 

via ELECTRIC LITERATURE
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What Sparks Poetry:
Kerry Folan on A Community Poetry Reading in Response to Violence


"I stay tuned in to the conversations happening in my community, and try to respond with events that respond. Like the rest of the world, my community has been watching the images of violence and reports of destruction of the past several months with despair. I wanted to offer my community a way to bear witness to all this suffering in a way that felt meaningful and respectful, and felt strongly that poetry can help us in this moment."
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