Michael Bazzett
they built it solely out of windows
so they could fling
them open and the house would become
air. Even the door
was a window. When it came time
to leave, the man announced, I come and go
so breezily. The woman
claimed she could not tell
where the sky ended
and her breathing began,
and the child shouted, Look at my body
flutter in the wind! Meanwhile,
the cast-off doors leaned
melancholy against the barn. Eventually
they found jobs as tabletops
and bedsteads; a few joined
forces to become a makeshift raft and soon
found themselves adrift
among strange floes of arctic ice.
How exactly did we get here? they muttered.
All our lives we opened
for others, yet now it seems life’s just begun—
from the journal THE CORTLAND REVIEW
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I love the idea of a poem as a house made of breath, and the fact that the word stanza is Italian for room. So poetry is something that can reside in the body: an invisible form that inhabits us, but that we also inhabit. It's a lovely paradox, and I imagine the place this work came from...
 
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Color publicity shot of Kim Hye-soon as a Royal Literature Society "International Writer"
Recognition for South Korea's Kim Hyesoon

"Poet Kim Hye-soon has been named an 'International Writer' by the Royal Society of Literature, based in London....The program annually invites writers to join the RSL to recognize the contribution of writers across the globe to English-language literature, 'celebrating the power of literature to transcend borders and bring people together.'"

via THE KOREA HERALD
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Color cover image of the translation of Celia Dropkin's book, The Acrobat
What Sparks Poetry:
Jennifer Kronovet on Celia Dropkin's "A Fear Growing in My Heart"

"Brazenness, surprise at my own flagrant flowering, disgust and enthrallment with my physical transformations, and a bloody lust: all of these things that Dropkin experienced, I have been able to experience on her terms, through them. Would I have known how to without her words? Would I have known how to come through the other side dripping with lyric instead of wrecked by frameless feeling?"
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