What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, our editorial board members and invited poets reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the book and an excerpt from the essay. 

Ahead the sky is winnowed to its smallest feature. Starred with damage, the body. What was promised, what was revealed. A long staircase of wounds. Behind: unseen error. Or accident. Harm winking on, a neon sign that says closed. Pain glued to each window. The rooms shadowed with harm. You offered anxiety, a harness made from care. Curved handle, in-tention. Harm a kind of adhesive. Skin clusters around the opening, ridged and thick. There are lighter and darker marks. They disclose. Pa- per echo, gesture. Bleakness along the spine of narrative. Harm flat as a swept floor. As a drawn planet. A bright story is requested. What will be touched? Machines, that flashing support, a threaded needle. And the body, sutured to harm.

from the book HARM / Omnidawn
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
What Sparks Poetry:
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."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
Headshot of Paul Tran
Paul Tran's All the Flowers Kneeling: a Confrontation of Pain and Poetic Form

"These poems are flamboyant in content, yet their craftsmanship is as discreet as invisible mending: you will not see the stitches unless you seek them. And it is invisible mending, in the fullest sense, that Tran does best. There is no expectation that poetry will bring conspicuous resolution. It is more subtle. The avoidance of the sonnet is in itself a resistance to completion (damage is not about happy endings)."

via THE GUARDIAN
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2022 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency