Matvei Yankelevich
Tuesday: how to go on writing warm words in round rain?
I'd be happy to speak your name in graphic, soundless
verses, but all the O's roll out of reach, so should I
roll there along with them to silence, though I long
to be precise and write you upbeat postcards — "Don't smoke
too much!" etc. — heroically longhanding
every letter or finally install black ribbon
(machine now older than my father was) and bang
thanks and condolences I owe the world that won't
be shut by glass excuses out. Although there is
all this that needs doing, I won't hunker down. Instead
carve open morbid quotation marks into my mind,
not having drunk enough to write a poem, search
my memory for memes and dead men, muse on some
last misunderstanding to find in that old failure
consolation and turn it like old sweaters inside
out in glad animal movements, roll through all things,
un-aging as one's final year, and jester questions
of myself: how is it that winter still hangs on you?
from the book DEAD WINTER / Fonograf
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This poem is part of an ongoing cycle—"From a Winter Notebook"—which plays on traditional winter themes of stasis, aging, lost love, belatedness, dormancy, and decline. Selections from the series have appeared in various journals and in the chapbooks From a Winter Notebook (Alder & Frankia) and Dead Winter (Fonograf). The poems' formal constraints and thematic concerns have been discussed by David Brazil in a review at Cleveland Review of Books.

 Matvei Yankelevich on "[Tuesday: how to go on writing warm words in round rain?]"
Cover of Victoria Adukwei Bulley's Book, Quiet
"The Best Recent Poetry – Review Roundup"

"'Bones can speak long after the flesh has gone.' Victoria Adukwei Bulley's debut is an exploration of the power of silence as a means of resistance, a way of carving space for the self in a hostile world. Rooted in Black feminist thinking, the poems have a clear-eyed elegance, buttressed with a controlled ferocity that is acute on the damage done by institutional blankness, and how it forces an uncomfortable conformity."

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Leah Nieboer on Hillary Gravendyk's Harm


"I keep reading it because it makes me desire its inevitable cyborgs and monsters, its palpitated time-signatures, its 'pink dreaming riot.' I, too, want to get weaved in. Or—I am already weaved in, and desire a present, and future, that is livable with, and inclusive of, a chronic error-measure. Give me less of that narrative 'cure' imposed 'across an abrupt jumble of absences' and more of this speculative wildness."
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