A newborn adjective squeals
in mixed light at dawn
under blankets, branches, and leaves
hustling in the larger wind
that pans out beyond language
as the shot tracks the horizon
all the way to the coast littered
with expired money sucked out by a wave
twirling uselessly to the undersea cave
of a dictionary's ghost
haunting meanings from words
to craft for itself an empty sentence
long enough to hold its nightly reenactments
of the scandal that banished it
to such lonely incoherence.
from the book IMPERSONAL RAINBOW & THE BISEXUAL PURGE / Canarium Books
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This poem comes out of a group of poems I filed under the title Impersonal Rainbow, which itself is a personal shorthand for art. The poems are around the length of sonnets and typically in one sentence that, I found, went just beyond my mind's capacity to track from start to finish, creating a hazy effect like childhood or a meeting or the internet.   

Paul Killebrew on "The Right to Be Past"
Informal color photograph of poet Kwame Dawes speaking
"Poet Kwame Dawes Talks Teaching, Mortality"

"He explained the complexity of intentionality in poetry—even poets, he said, often don’t know how to execute their intentions. He referred to the complicated balance between the 'pragmatics of being a writer' and the difficult topics poets want to write about—'our preoccupations and obsessions become the fodder for what we wrestle with on the page.'"

via THE BROWN DAILY HERALD
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Cover of Wet Sands
What Sparks Poetry:
J. Michael Martinez on Reading Prose

"'A small disunified theory' constellates from a lyrical response to Leslie Jamison's 'Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain' to a further diagnosis of late-stage capital's easy co-opting of raw moment's bodily musk spill, our meat's revolutionary intensities suddenly dimmed by the weight of brands, these 'names'."
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