This poem arose out of an etymology prompt. A lot of my work recently has been focused on the idiosyncrasies of post-colonial New Zealand vernacular. The frequency and flexibility of the likes of "piss/shit/fuck" in my home country never seeks to amaze me, especially in situations where language escapes or fails us. It can offer levity or escalation. It can distill or distract. Piss as booze, piss as water, piss as anger, piss as mocking, piss as bonding, piss for all!
Jordan Hamel on "The night of infinite piss" |
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Review of Good Dress by Brittany Rogers
"From the pews to the avenues, Brittany Rogers declares her own freedom and presence. She busts the rhetorical space wide open for every Black woman she has ever wanted to be, be with or bemoan. This book is 'rows and rows of gold pendants' forcing us to look at and remember the beauty and the pain, the mundane and the extraordinary, the progress and the paradox that is Black womxnhood."
via PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE |
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What Sparks Poetry:
David Gorin on Life in Public
"The surface of the moon in winter is a figure for isolation. It could be a happy isolation, the kind that writers and artists often seek to do their work, which we often dignify with the name 'solitude.' Its 'winter' could imply what Wallace Stevens had in mind in 'The Snow Man,' a state in which one sees 'nothing that is not there'—that is, without projection or illusion. But that isolation might also be the kind that isn’t happy. It could be the kind that comes with being close to people in the wrong way, or the one to which you flee when you have experienced wrong closeness, where intimacy is a vector for harm." |
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