Latest Playlist
My Second Work
Playlist by Carnegie Mellon University PressMetaphysical in concern, hypermodern in tone, Bridget Lowe returns in this anticipated second collection, determined as ever to make meaning from the perversity of suffering. My Second Work is rare in its ability to be widely resonant, as Lowe transforms experiences of shame, disgust, and bewilderment into a kind of unexpected hope. The narrator exposes the ways our bodies, minds, and souls are formed—and deformed—by the work we do. No one, nothing, is spared in Lowe’s discerning assessment — even the moon must “manage her tides / for a life of unpaid overtime / before the final intervention.”
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Featured on May 25, 2020
Autobiography of Horse
Playlist by Gaudy BoyA frenetic tour of a splayed self writing through an equine obsession, Autobiography of Horse documents Park’s obsessive and parasitic relationship with the horse. At one point a muse, the horse is transformed into a vessel used to travel the volatile hollows of memory, selfhood, and loss. To make this journey, the horse mutates from an image into a companion, a projection, and a reflection that, as Wallace Stevens wrote in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” injects imagination with “the strength of reality.”
View playlist to continue readingFeatured on May 18, 2020
God's Green Earth
Playlist by Wave BooksThe poems of Noelle Kocot's latest collection are ones of acute astonishment, tracking the intense spiritual and ecstatic elements that pervade the everyday world, the "fine surges of torrential / Probabilities" amid the "flotsam strewn under this compromised / Heaven." Bleak yet full of glory, these poems are a quest that showcase a poet at her visionary and poetic heights, where every turn of line, every sudden appearance, is one to arrest our attention and thought.
View playlist to continue readingFeatured on May 11, 2020
The Gospel of Breaking
Playlist by Jillian ChristmasIn The Gospel of Breaking, Jillian Christmas confirms what followers of her performance and artistic curation have long known: there is magic in her words. Befitting someone who "speaks things into being," Christmas extracts from family history, queer lineage, and the political landscape of a racialized life to create a rich, softly defiant collection of poems. Christmas draws a circle around the things she calls "holy": the family line that cannot find its root but survived to fill the skies with radiant flesh; the body, broken and unbroken and broken and new again; the lover lost, the friend lost, and the loss itself; and the hands that hold them all with brilliant, tender care. Expansive and beautiful, these poems allow readers to swim in Jillian Christmas's mother-tongue and to dream at her shores.
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