Author’s note: “Poetry for me is often a way to write about and cope with things that are emotionally fraught, painful, frightening, things that are too hard to approach head-on. This is one of those ... [Continue Story]
Authors Note: “‘Natalie’ plays with the concept of reality: a highly subjective and individual experience, yet a noun carrying meaning in our collective consciousness. When it loses touch with what most of us agree is the truth, we call this experience a psychosis. My unnamed narrator tells the story of existence from her point of view, and it is up to the reader to pick the version that agrees with them. I hope that I convey my compassion for this lost soul who is temporarily overwhelmed by her shame, fear and the weight of being human.”[Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “When I wrote “Debris” I was working on a series of poems about things we leave behind. When I started to research space junk, I was taken by the notion of something so small being capable of immense damage. The poem took off from there.”... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “Dostoevsky, Rubenstein, Mussorgsky—Russia’s titans of literature, music & art—have lain in repose in an antique cemetery in Saint Petersburg since the 19th century. Visitors stroll through, ooh-ing & ahh-ing over the elaborate statuary, and they snap a few pix, but nobody cries. It takes a person with fresh grief to shed tears there... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “Wend is a sijo, a traditional Korean syllabic verse form that emerged in the Goryeo period (918 – 1392) and is still popular today. Themes range from the bucolic to the metaphysical. The standard pattern is three lines (each broken into two half lines) that average 14–16 syllables, for a total of 42–48: theme (3, 4, 4, 4); elaboration (3, 4, 4, 4); counter-theme (3, 5) and completion (4 ,3).” [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “The rooms we inhabit often inhabit us in ways we may not even realize. ‘Never Room’ is a poem about coping with miscarriage in which place and memory intersect. It tries to capture a moment on the trajectory of loss that also hints at future loss in the form of divorce. I tend... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “I live just across a cove from the Delaware City Refinery, so it’s often in my thoughts. It’s been bought and sold several times during its sixty-four years; and in 2009 it was shut down. A buyer was eventually found, and it reopened two years later. I kept thinking about those two years, ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “After a retinal tear took me dangerously close to blindness in my right eye, I was instructed to see an ophthalmologist twice a year to ensure the surgical repair that saved my sight ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “ ‘Stone Sijo’ is my attempt to highlight the materiality of language by using only monosyllabic words. I think of each word as a stone, and the poem itself as an edifice constructed of carefully-placed stones. Sound is foregrounded. The stanza form is that of a sijo, but I linked five of them... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “Departures” explores the leave-taking that people often confront in their life journey, be it career-related, a redefining of one’s self or of a relationship, or a trading of the past and present for some hoped-for future. In this story, one man on the cusp of retirement has his notions of self, of happiness, and of what constitutes fulfillment shaken to the core. He finally experiences transcendence, once when he rediscovers compassion and again when he frees himself from the constraints that kept him focused on the ground beneath him instead of on the stars above... [Continue Story]
