What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Reading Prose, poets share with us how the experience of reading prose, fiction, non-fiction, theory, or poetics, has sparked the writing of poetry or affected how they read poetry. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay.
        After Leslie Jamison

We've gone pale all over, a capital drain
through which forever is stripped of its or—
manufactured selection reduced to fever.
The fetish of radiant tragedies, handmaidens
dressed in collateral adjectives. Aren't we

rendered a menagerie? A diluted
zoomorphic palette, our racked bodies, kittens
& rabbits & sunsets & sordid red satin
goddesses. The altar a pedestaled cage. Our hair
feeds the fibrous needs of the heavens. Queens

of miserable. It says all this here, in the doctor's
script, his terrible cursive. Patriarchy's bloat
& interlock. Exploit & cramp.

We ailment & scorn. Barely a sign, these
broken hearts, broken bones, broken lungs. Caught
in centuries of wound, ever after
of the world. Its rhythms of subjugation.
The body is simply an extension, a spasm

of the wound. The world. The choral refrain
of experts: it's all in our heads
in our heads      in our heads.

The choral refrain of despots
& hoarders of gain, of gatekeepers &
too many men: it's all in our heads
in our heads     in our heads      in our

heads. Let the body speak (of its illnesses, its
dispossessions), declare its stolen. Let the body
say it for you. A crown-to-heel testimony,
inflammatory indeed.

Summon the memory, the nebulous
conditions of our devastation. Summon
the acute & chronic aftermath. The throb
& burn of aperture & rift. Drastic shapes
call for what will be deemed drastic measures:

from the outside, orchestral noise abounds.
We know how to handle each other's
blood. How to butter our bread.

I learn the names of your mothers, you mine.

Study the sounds of your dispossessions,
the pace of your pulse under upheaval,
laughter masking stiff tissue form. I your
& you mine, I your & you mine.

Our wounds, our bodies & their becomings.
A fetal universe in lambent hungers.

A snow early & long in the arms, but here
we are, coruscating against invasion,
vining our way up through it.
A mess of aching limbs devoted to the light.

Staggering, isn't it?

How improbable we are.
from the book WET SANDS / LibroMobile
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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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Cover of Grand Tour
"Burning Pages: On Elisa Gonzalez's Grand Tour"

"Elisa Gonzalez may very well be a great poet, and, like all great poets, she is haunted by poetry—the poetry of Homer, of John Ashbery, of … Marilyn Monroe. In an illuminating essay in The Paris Review entitled 'Marilyn the Poet,' Gonzalez writes about how Monroe's 'dashed-off, insular poems embody an oft-submerged but ever-present feature of lyric poetry: a dialogue within the self, overheard by the self.'"

via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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