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Susan Atefat-Peckham
                          Grandfather, memory
must be subatomic. The cells remember
when the tumor blooms, choking silent
the neck where only darkness once
breathed through and through, a sore heart
seething in the ribs of your throat, a seed
hanging by one root, an albaloo fruit.
That tiny red thought—it's chromosomal.
The cells—they remember all the dark
passageways of the body. I carry your
dying inside me like this,
                   remembering
your first symptom—unable to swallow—
when you swallowed all your life mast-e
sadeh, hoping to keep doctors away,
swallowed all that lean beef and lamb,
sure to cut the fat off first, no liquor,
no drugs. What good did it do? I

remember your never setting heels
on the street of anyone you even
suspected had cancer. As if you could
breathe the sickness in—we all have
our superstitions. I think, Don't tempt
the body,
this,

                                  when I force
my legs to jog down our suburban
Michigan streets, far from the hot tar
Tehran smells of your house, of wet
asphalt, your body, your soap, force
myself through echoes of your voice
praying, through lake effect heat, wind, 
sleet, fog, whatever, as if running
from the bone-baring paring knife,
bowls full of marrow, and I'm sure I
know how I will die, the pull of thighs,
tearing through tangles of leaves.
Walls cluster quiet midwestern homes
toward the lake while the future courses
through the beating heart, over, and over,
keeping time.
                            Pushing through blue
burning water, to sky, through torn seams
of membranes, we burst from the deep,
dark black mouth of memory.
from the book DEEP ARE THESE DISTANCES BETWEEN US / CavanKerry Press
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I often find myself in awe of the incantatory and prophetic nature of my mother’s poetry. This poem, about the death of her beloved grandfather, teaches me that poetry can be a site of communion and connection between the living and the dead, as well as a reincarnation—that the page can be both the “deep, / dark black mouth of memory and “the future cours[ing] through the beating heart, over, and over, / keeping time.” 
 
Color photograph of plush seagulls (the Norton logo) and a pile of books
Norton Celebrates 100 Years

"Co-founded in 1923 by William Warder Norton, the company began as a press for science and philosophy books....While other legacy American houses have been swallowed up by European companies and corporate consolidation, Norton has occupied an increasingly defiant space in the industry as the only major publisher owned by its employees. The centenary bash at Cipriani was a celebration of the company’s refusal to capitulate."

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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Cover of Courtney LeBlanc's book, Her Whole Bright Life
Andrew Bertaina on Courtney LeBlanc's "Her Whole Bright Life"

"I have always been attracted to visceral writing, that which cuts through or illuminates life as it is lived. Perhaps raising children has made me less patient with ornamentation for its own sake. So, I was delighted to sink into LeBlanc’s world, poems about the death of her father and her relationship to her body, poems that are raw and unvarnished in their honesty about grief, about loss, about the management of the body, all those things we cannot ever really control but still try desperately to."
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