Black Peculiar is now available! You can order from Noemi Press.…

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Jan Beatty – title poem from Red Sugar (University of Pittsburgh Press 2008)

 

When I came across Red Sugar, via recommendation on Amazon no less, I got angry that I hadn't heard of her sooner. I felt cheated that I had not known about her in grad school; I could have learned so much!  So, although she's pretty well established with three books published already, I think it's appropriate to include her work as the final post for the week because I love the…

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Naomi Benaron - "The Language of Water" from her unpublished chapbook The Bones by Which We Stand

 

Aside from being a celebrated and virtuosic prose writer, Naomi Benaron is an accomplished poet who delivers a deep sense of awareness and social conscience in her work. She manages to make sweeping and beautiful the most painful of subjects, rendering cinematically the best and worst of the human…

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Sarah Gambito – "Immigration," from Delivered (Persea Books 2009)

 

The speaker in "Immigration" is fierce and complex in questioning the nature and consequences of assimilation. The poem challenges simplistic definitions of immigration's legacy, whether for an individual or a country as a whole. In rejecting any assumptions that history is sacred, the poem is a dare and a scare and a middle finger. Its barbs are aimed at a constructed veneer, digging underneath the…

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Ashaki Jackson – "Passing Pamhona" from her unpublished manuscript Thus Are Our Bodies

 

Ashaki M. Jackson's background as a social psychologist informs her work, as does her interest in the ritual cannibalism practices of "diminishing tribes" in the Amazon and elsewhere. Her poems consider takes a violently unimaginable act and re-frames it, showing how consumption of the body becomes a consumption of grief -- not such a far stretch in this poem, and delivered to…

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Valzhyna Mort - "Belarusian I"

 

When I heard Valzhyna Mort read this poem at the Austin International Poetry Festival in 2007 I got chills, and four years later, I still feel the same effect. Aside from the riveting emotional and visual power of the poem, and the layered-in metaphor for the struggle to preserve her native language, she manages to capture the vulnerability of children trapped in impossible (adult-created) circumstances with a relentless gaze. And within that,…

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Claire Hero – "A Landskip" from Sing, Mongrel (Noemi Press 2009)

 

When I read Claire Hero's work, I feel so many things -- splashed in the face with cold water, sucked into a vacuum, throttled, tossed around in a mosh pit even. Which is to say, her language is fresh, violent, smart, cool. Read her poems and allow your synapses to un- and re-stitch; then say, Oh. Yes. That's better. 

 

 

A LANDSKIP

 

I am in…

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Vievee Francis from Art X Detroit on Vimeo.

Vievee Francis - "The Scale of Empire" from Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press 2006)

 

Vievee's work is powerful and visionary. She takes poetry seriously and demands readers do the same…

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Of course it was difficult to choose only 7! I have tons of favorite poems written across time and cultures from a wide variety of poets -- Phillis Wheatley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Marina Tsvetaeva and Gwendolyn Brooks; Theresa Cha and Gabriela Mistral and Lorine Niedecker. But for this, I wanted to choose some by just a few contemporary living poets (mostly emerging) whose work I admire. The pieces chosen reflect my interest in the body, in women's communities and rituals, how human… Continue