I am sitting by the kitchen table sorting beans. I am called to this task because it requires attention to detail and small fingers – both of which, at the age of ten, I possess. I never, however, understood how those tiny pebbles get inside …
I At once irreplaceable and hors concours in the book business, further, tact and consideration in the treatment of, the more vital, because, though often arrogant and unreasonable, importance allies with considerable helplessness, insecurity, and anxiety; The Novelist. Publishing history enshrines minuscule minority rather than mere producers …
1 I dive straight and deliberately into the pool and slice the still water into a thousand ripples. The sun streams through the glass gym walls. My body glides through the chilly lane toward the finish of a lap. The pungent smell of chlorine fills …
Our hamsters are too still in their cage, so I stick my finger through the grates to curl around the one I think is mine. Without confirmation of a bite, a droplet of my blood, I can’t be certain. I am sure he is too …
My first time visiting the beach in two-thousand and ten is a blizzard. I arrive late in the day. It is early May. The sun is already sinking into the ocean, but I still need to taste salt and bathe in its reflective face. I …
They handed me the shovel and ordered me to dig. With each pound I gained. With each wrinkle I acquired. With each stretch mark I earned. Every time, they barked at me to dig. “Dig!” The Victoria Secret angels strolling down the runway, condemning me …
“In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations….” – Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California.” Like most people, I go to the grocery store. Unlike most people, I spend a lot of my free …
The first weekend of May, I attended Vortex, a three-day writers’ conference that took place at Whidbey Institute, on Whidbey Island, Washington. Organized by Hedgebrook, a leading organization helping women writers, Vortex is an annual event that celebrates women authoring change. During the conference, I was fortunate to lodge on site, on the property of Whidbey Institute, in a tiny cottage surrounded by tall evergreen trees and narrow trails that branched like sunrays, leading deeper into the forest.
This morning you are going to pour yourself on digital paper. The weak winter sun attempts to open the apartment with light and warmth. With your hands around your morning cup of coffee, you patter about the place, thinking of how you should start the …
In the anthology, American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (the first volume of the series), editors Juliana Spahr and Claudia Rankine gather a selection of contemporary women poets whose poems, included within the volume, represent some of the most pressing and potent examples of the innovative and radical possibilities of the poetic lyric. One continually exercised possibility is the use of lyric as a means of questioning language and its relationship to meaning, as determined by the self or by a wider community.