Rachel Hadas: Pastorals
Its title is Red Comet, but the book itself is more like a long freight train, a slow train, a train crammed with information, a train that stops at every station, not to let anyone out but to take more in.
Gerald Fleming: The Secret
The man had the sense the secret was planning escape.
Deborah Bogen: Two Poems
I think of the ways we got it wrong. All the things we didn’t know. Who did it — and why — where it was done and how we can think about the Lord’s Prayer as thirteen ways of looking at a tragedy.
Elizabeth Kirschner: Because the Sky is a Thousand Soft Hurts
Never forget how easily we love what survives to be loved.
Michelle Bitting: Walls
Worst I had to deal with, well, I suppose that time my son was shut in a padded room and shit himself at the special needs school. He was 13 and having one helluva wiring crisis. I got called to come get him after he graffitied his feces across white walls.
Gerald Fleming: About Stone
If you are not honest, stone will make you honest. Lifting it, breaking it, fitting it. The work is mostly quiet—the main sound the sound of stone against stone. The work is close to the ground.