All the poets in this playlist are from Nashville, Tennessee. Whether it's hot chicken, the Parthenon, or the capital-S-South — something in the magnolias — a city brings these varied authors together.
“Apart from humans, maybe, trees are the best form of life on this planet. Trees remain in one place, but reach elsewhere always. They stretch down into the ground, and they constantly strain toward the sun. They are the embodiment of our shared presence on a rocky planet that orbits a star. Hedgehogs and helminths may be interesting, but they don’t constantly remind us, simply by existing, that we are in a solar system.” – Rebecca Boyle, “Make Like A Tree and Get Outta Here”
Lucie Brock-Broido, a dazzling poet and beloved teacher of poetry, passed away on March 6. The poems below give a taste of her unique sensibility and gifts--the sonic lushness, the deftly twisted and turned phrases, the critical yet playful intelligence, and the juxtapositions that cascade into the poems from every order of creation.
These poems show us what it might be like to enter the mind of another creature: mammoth, dog, cow, or sponge. With a variety of distances and dictions, they try to enact what must be both familiar and impossibly remote.
Just as the common milkweed plant is the site of metamorphosis for monarch butterflies, Milkweed Editions seeks to be a site of metamorphosis in the literary ecosystem. We take risks on debut and experimental writers, we invest significant time and care in the editorial process, and we enable dynamic engagement between authors and readers.
Verse is honored to bring you these six poems selected from new books by Milkweed Editions. Links to purchase each book are within.
