Lucie Brock-Broido
That Same Vagabond Sweetness
Odd I cannot remember a time
When there was no World. I am
At home, at callow home
Worshipping the train, the Elsewhere's
Metallic sweetness, scissoring. A pack
Of blessings lights upon my back.
There are thou happy.
The noise of the world's tracks
Made magical alarms me. There
Are thou happy too. And the half
Blown catweed & the vagrant
Sky & the vacant apoplectic
Bed shiftless in its vacancy, I stop.
[from Verse, Volume 12, Number 3]
VERSE
Founded in Oxford, England in 1984, Verse is an international journal that publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art. The print edition publishes portfolios of 20-40 pages, while the Verse site publishes book reviews and individual poems. Verse is edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki.
Wednesday, March 07, 2018
Monday, March 05, 2018
Friday, March 02, 2018
new issue of VERSE
Volume 34 (the final print issue of Verse) is out and includes poetry and prose portfolios by
Vincent Zompa (winner of the 2016 Tomaž Šalamun Prize)
Monica McClure
Julie Carr
Dan Rosenberg
Molly Brodak
Ryoko Sekiguchi (translated by Lindsay Turner)
Arianne Zwartjes
Daniel Biegelson
Ben Gaffaney
Kell Connor
Jaclyn Sadicario
Matvei Yankelevich
Dara Wier
To order a copy, visit https://verse.submittable.com/submit.
Sunday, January 14, 2018
Now open to entries for the 2018 Tomaz Salamun Prize!
deadline: March 15, 2018
The winner's chapbook will be published by Factory Hollow Press. The winner will receive $500 and a one-month residency in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
To submit, visit:
https://verse.submittable.com/submit
The winner's chapbook will be published by Factory Hollow Press. The winner will receive $500 and a one-month residency in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
To submit, visit:
https://verse.submittable.com/submit
Tuesday, July 11, 2017
4 days left to submit to the 2017 Tomaz Salamun Prize!
https://verse.submittable.com/submit/41191/tomaz-salamun-prize-2017
Winner receives $500, publication by Factory Hollow Press, and 1-month residency in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Winner receives $500, publication by Factory Hollow Press, and 1-month residency in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Monday, April 24, 2017
NEW! Poem by Natalie Lyalin
Natalie Lyalin
SO WHAT, THE CLOUDS
So what, the clouds
with a piercing gold haze
so a red feather stuck to my foot
The gull’s squawk, so what
Mother, father, horseshoe crab
I thought I spotted them all in
the glare of sunset
So what, the smudge of life
sooting bleached branches,
disinfecting the parts that need it
So what, until we say goodbye
we had a weekend together
and I helped pick out your dress
What does it matter
The tin chandelier pocked with holes
So what the rain
I never visited or cared too much
The bottles and woven baskets full of sea glass
Hair grit, white towel snapping in the wind
Birds circling their condos
An abundance of banana bread
Celebrating America not on the fourth of July
but on the 16th, when nothing is happening
Surprisingly I am somebody’s mother
I have no council
I turn on the lights
The sun crests the bank of pines pushing on the
dusk
While overhead a group of rockets take off from
Cape Canaveral
making an arc toward heaven
Sunday, April 02, 2017
2017 Tomaž Šalamun Prize
The 2017 Tomaž Šalamun Prize is open for entries until July 15, 2017.
$500 + chapbook published by Factory Hollow Press + one-month residency in Ljubljana, Slovenia
Judge: Matthew Zapruder
The Tomaž Šalamun Prize is open to poets at any stage of their career. Previous publication is neither a requirement nor a restriction. You can enter if you've published no books or 100 books.
Translations into English are acceptable if the author is still living and has given written permission.
Prose poetry and hybrid forms are also acceptable.
The winning chapbook will be published by Factory Hollow Press in Amherst, MA.
The prize winner will receive $500, 10 free copies of their chapbook, and a free one-month residency at the Tomaž Šalamun Center for Poetry in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
If a translation wins the prize, the translator will receive $500, 10 copies of the chapbook, and the residency, but the original author also will receive 10 copies of the chapbook.
Individual pieces in the chapbook may have been published in print and/or online journals, but the chapbook itself must be previously unpublished.
Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but please withdraw your submission immediately if your submission is accepted elsewhere.
Matthew Zapruder will judge the 2017 prize. Current/former students and close friends of the judge are not eligible. (If in doubt about your eligibility, query editorversemag@gmail.com.)
Entry fee: $12
Deadline: July 15, 2017
To enter: Submit a poetry chapbook (18-28 pages) to the link above.
To enter: Submit a poetry chapbook (18-28 pages) to the link above.
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
NEW! Review of Elizabeth Powell
Willy
Loman’s Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary
Circumstances by Elizabeth Powell. Anhinga,
2016.
Reviewed by
Nancy Mitchell
Elizabeth
Powell’s compelling new volume of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter or
Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, winner of the 2015 Robert
Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry and published by Anhinga Press, is the saga of one psyche’s circuitous, courageous evolution to wholeness
as it reclaims and integrates the fragments of its shattered self. Like a
classic epic, the book is
substantial; its 109 pages are divided into four distinct, yet integrated
parts, and the arc of each furthers the narrative arc of the collection, the
tension of which lies in “the tug of war between what you are and what you want
to be.” In lines barely held in check by semi-formal constraints of rhyme and
rhythm, the poems pellmell the reader through poems like “a toboggan threshing
me down a hill.” The wrangle of this struggle is underscored by erratically
shifting tones via inventive syntax and humorous, original
neologisms/verbalizations: “I lollygagged and sofatized as I proceeded with the
CNN-induced lobotomy dream of life,” and
The
world, violent full of sex,
the
movie’s zeitgeist, era
after era, a new Bond
double-o-sevening
in
(CARE PACKAGE, WITH RIDDLE AS
MISSIVE)
as well as with startling enjambments:
…This
poem is made of me and I it. It doesn’t worry
about
irony
or stance and only odd incidence and fact and doesn’t care
if
it tells the truth about what will happen to my face
or
behind my back….
Part One, the heftiest section, worthy to stand on its
own as a separate volume, serves as the Genesis, the creation story of the
collection, as it introduces the origin of the book’s structure along which
uncanny parallels to the speaker’s life
are plotted:
Around then, I read
my father’s 1960s Compass copy of Arthur Miller's
"Death
of a Salesman" and began to understand why his sister called
him Willy Loman. He had eaten the dream and it
made him sick...But
my
father’s sister never stopped with the Willy Loman talk, and so we
seemed
to be acting that play as our family drama.
(“AUTOCORRECTING THE LYRIC I”)
From
a longstanding intimacy with
the American drama—“This entire book is in love with Death of a Salesman
by Arthur Miller, and has been in conversation with it for a good, long time,”
according to Powell’s notes—and subsequent internalization, a world is created
into which the title character is called forth from the a shadowy subterranean
of unconsciousness, or “my doppelgänger under the bed, snoring and talking and
laughing in her sleep,” to inhabit this world with full autonomy: “I read it
again and again, until the doppelgänger moved from under the bed to the top
bunk.”
Powell’s doppelgänger is an alchemic tour de force, deftly
echoing Plath: “and then I knew what to do. / I made a model of you,” claims a
poem also titled “Daddy.” Willy Loman’s daughter, paradoxically whole and black
hole, becomes the self into which other selves, shattered “the way the Rolling
Stones sing about” by seismic psychological pressures, are absorbed. Because
the doppelgänger can successfully assimilate undifferentiated cultural
identities—
Let’s say I’m fusion of cold borscht and finger
sandwiches on white. I'm
matzo
ball Jew Bagel and thrifty Campbell’s soup with dried parsley
don’t-worry-about-me
luncheon. I’m noodle
kugel and I’m turkey divan
casserole. I’m
Bubbeleh and I’m Dearie. I’m Ma and I’m Mummy. I’m
the Episcojew, and
I am strong and not strong! I have a family tartan
and a silence in
the Vilnius ghetto. I cannot be buried in the holy land
but I cannot be cremated. I am
passing and have passed, heard the
murmurs of lovely & also
... Dirty Jews, Fucking Gentiles.
—as well as the trauma of sexual
abuse—
…small
child who is taken into a room with
an ex-convict and made to drink peppermint
schnapps and lie on his
polyester
orange and yellow bed and black out until she walks from
the
room and is shown his medals of valor from a war she doesn't
understand. She didn’t
know peppermint that way until she came
to dislike the sunniest days. (“Sense
Memory: (Re)-Experiencing Time Travel”)
she
becomes the trustworthy, although admittedly imaginary confidant, sister in Pasternak’s “sister life,”
the ma souer
of the speaker. Both protective mediator and arbiter of memory, the
doppelgänger will become the the reliable narrator, even as she speaks as a
foil to other characters throughout the book, but only with the speaker’s
complicity or permission:
My
retinal flashes made no sense until I realized they were someone
else’s story trying to
live through me. That sweet doppleganger, brother-
sister, evil other, good girl! The
story kept banging at my red front door…
“Someone
else’s story” is also the speaker’s; by opening the “red front door” she
intuitively and courageously allows the necessary psychic split into a stronger
double who, acting as a “second,” descends into the hell of the past and faces
down the demons of abandonment and estrangement, before assimilating them and
returning whole to tell the whole story.
In the poem “LIVING TRUTHFULLY UNDER
IMAGINARY CIRCUMSTANCES,” the speaker speaks for “both of them” with, “We both want to be whole, so the
story can be told.” In my notes I’ve written, “Or maybe:
We want the story to be told so we can both be whole.” Elizabeth Powell’s stunning,
evocative Willy Loman’s
Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, is, like any
odyssey, to be read in parts, slowly, carefully, and reflectively, like a
psyche recovering the shattered parts of herself.
Monday, July 11, 2016
2016 Tomaž Šalamun Prize deadline
Submissions for the 2016 Tomaž Šalamun Prize will be accepted through July 15. Dara Wier is the final judge.
Wednesday, July 06, 2016
NEW! Poem by Tiffany Higgins
Tiffany Higgins
Can Starfish?
in the form of a Googlet, a found poem formed from Google dropdown suggestions generated by a beginning phrase
in the form of a Googlet, a found poem formed from Google dropdown suggestions generated by a beginning phrase
can starfish bite
can starfish see
can starfish feel pain
can starfish survive out of water
can starfish get itch
can starfish hurt you
can starfish hear
can starfish reproduce
can starfish eat humans
can starfish eat humans
Friday, May 13, 2016
NEW! from Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's Journal with Closed Eyes
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
from Journal with Closed Eyes
Translated from the French by Luke Hankins
The August heat pierces me to the core. The flies too. And his patched-up pajamas. He had to sell his gold watch to some neighbors . . . Soon, very soon, his life will be over. Sitting on the edge of the bed, his breathing shallow . . . He asks me for a cigarette.
First I stand up, then I find the pack, next . . . But is there really an order to things? I’ve made and repeated these motions for such a long time, always the same, backwards and forwards, I extend my hand, I find the pack, I light the cigarette, I know it won’t burn to the end.
The sun through the windows is already making me sweat. The next room over, the children are waking up. The lapping of their little voices.
You could begin a book this way. Or end one.
~
The pages have scattered on the beach. Letters fall off, wrap around rocks, fray, twist, attach to the roots of plants, strange organisms, writhing seaweed . . .
A melody rises from the earth. Suddenly I recognize it, it’s the one I put on in the car sometimes. Then it changes. I hear footsteps underground . . .
Untangle these letters, gather them from the sand, it’s my job, I’m the one who has to do it, I know it.
I’m the one who invented them, drew them with colored pencils in my notebook.
And I can’t move, my feet, my steps . . .
This seaweed that grows out of me . . .
~
The nights are very long and the days pass unnoticed. I hear thoughts like little motors whirring in the air. Others’ thoughts and my own. Living, keeping me company, more alive than those to whom they belong.
Over the years some have grown hard with rust; others, weakening, falling apart, still delight me. So I wind them up, set the little motors going, and I listen to them . . .
I’d have a hard time waking tomorrow to find only silence.
~
It’s three in the morning, the dead in their graves. I think of them. Thought is alive, warm, it gathers itself, forms a kernel that attaches itself to the world, and it begins to move, to shift.
I give the dead this gift, the only one possible.
The dead—a formless mass on which we walk.
Monday, April 25, 2016
Dan Ivec / 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist
Dan Ivec
[2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist]
[2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist]
The Nocturnal Biennial
Every second year
on the shortest night of the year
the prisoners are allowed
to escape it is a folk tradition
begun in the days when
we were all prisoners
and knew what it was
to live or to want to live.
Friday, April 22, 2016
E.C. Belli / 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist
E.C. Belli
[2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist]
[2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist]
Apology
Another battering, brown
Grass. It’s hives, you see, not the sky
I want to talk about. Clean
Sleep. Sundown is a musing
Ruin, a tired gaze. Do you
Know it by any other name?
I am supremely content—
Though I despise board games
And Sunday afternoons.
Put on a decent face, I’d like to say
Some days. We’re all crushed
With longing. Last week,
I left the dog with someone
Who almost let him die. It didn’t matter
To her—his trench-deep eyes,
Four sturdy legs, a trodden heart
Endless with hope; all the
Little things that make you
You. One person in the world
Loved him, you see—made him
Less wretched, which is to say
Easier to maim without remorse.
Love is always a good cause
For injury.
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Todd Melicker / 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist
Todd Melicker
[2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist]
Though not to love, yet love to tell me so
list rain as an
accomplishment
list a bird tucked
in the lip
list sorrow, patience,
list spoons
list tongue-tied
lift, ill-wresting love
the people of the
tongue—why
i should grow
pressed fog
spills in the
valley
i should grow
hinges
Monday, April 18, 2016
Beth Marzoni / 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist
Beth Marzoni
[2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist]
from The Driftless Is Literal
Mostly, when the locals talked, their gossip was a type of prayer. Mostly to their patron saint of the snow bank, of have-not & want-less. Mostly, measurement was the problem. Always too much or never enough—mostly humility & when it wasn’t, precipitation. Mostly I struggled with attention. Mostly, I hurled bricks, but I didn’t wake any less anxious. If anything, the ache burrowed deeper. If I believed in prayer, I’d have prayed for grace & for birdsong. I realized that I’d had it backwards all this time: the weather reports us. Mostly, when I talked, it was to myself. Who is the patron saint of the bell & who of its silence? Who is the patron saint of the song tangled in these sheets? Saint of the flood plain. Saint of the cell tower. Saint of the long haul. Saint of static, take it. You can have it all.
Sunday, April 17, 2016
2016 Tomaž Šalamun Prize open to entries
The 2016 Tomaž Šalamun Prize is open for entries until July 15, 2016. Writers who have published no more than 2 books are eligible. The prize is for a chapbook-length portfolio (20-40 pages). The winner receives $1000 and publication in the print edition of Verse. Dara Wier is the final judge. To submit, visit:
https://verse.submittable.com/submit
https://verse.submittable.com/submit
Saturday, April 16, 2016
Bradley Fest / 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist
Bradley Fest
[2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist]
[2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist]
Architects and Their Books
Time’s laceration let out upon a mahogany
doorstep. The kind we make up as children
in bed, alone. As if there was another option.
As if Mr. Panda could have been a different kind
of confidant. We’ll let feeling in for a moment
only to have it sutured, impossibly, to understanding,
like a saddled-beast lounging on the quarterdeck of this,
our present colloquium. We’ll let this we we have become
stumble off into the night, infantilized like so many
un-pursued dreamscapes. Some fourth person
would have to arrive, as if on her way to the depot
like a harried harbinger of ice-cold and forgotten departures.
Systems work. Molasses drips. Sanguine yearning
churns out of the cattle-press, always. Elaborate
please. The insufficiency at work in the hazy
construction of some kind of yesterday approaches
melancholy, at best. Meaning: do not become forensic.
Take the pictures, sure, but be careful only to document
the details matching the case, the important lineaments
frequenting this, desire’s current neoliberal expression.
Not, to be sure, the relevant dripping mucus on the mirror
nor the chaste notes rippling the flag. I like tumescence
as much as the next victim, but would prefer not to get
carried away on the back of some gryphon-steed as my tail feathers
wag toward the sky. I, not you, work conscientiously for
a million little dumb show matinees. Silent, they’re performed in
parking structures made from fiberglass and patience. Stalwart,
I tell you, they house forever-notes. Next time, get down.
Be careful with the perforated letter. She’ll unhouse you,
so close to the walkway as you are. The dappled smoke
seeping out of the sun connotes not requiems nor certainty.
Canned sentiment is perhaps killing our house pets. Or else
freedom has (perhaps) deleted our houseguests. The threshold
doesn’t mind the imperative I’m giving, the command from silent structures
to the trains that pass in the middle of the day, lonely on their eastward
wandering, and working toward dental transcendence, rollicking
their rhythm forward and through the densities of fine, trellised
woodwork. Post-arboretum sale, the delicacies purchased,
the light of them, their coma-inducing glare, capsized the moment.
Sure, queens of delight strode thoughtfully down lanes of embarkation,
distances folded together in their tresses, like panoplied andromedans,
like fore-warned, miscreant saboteurs on their way to endless satisfaction.
Time’s laceration let out upon a mahogany
doorstep. The kind we make up as children
in bed, alone. As if there was another option.
As if Mr. Panda could have been a different kind
of confidant. We’ll let feeling in for a moment
only to have it sutured, impossibly, to understanding,
like a saddled-beast lounging on the quarterdeck of this,
our present colloquium. We’ll let this we we have become
stumble off into the night, infantilized like so many
un-pursued dreamscapes. Some fourth person
would have to arrive, as if on her way to the depot
like a harried harbinger of ice-cold and forgotten departures.
Systems work. Molasses drips. Sanguine yearning
churns out of the cattle-press, always. Elaborate
please. The insufficiency at work in the hazy
construction of some kind of yesterday approaches
melancholy, at best. Meaning: do not become forensic.
Take the pictures, sure, but be careful only to document
the details matching the case, the important lineaments
frequenting this, desire’s current neoliberal expression.
Not, to be sure, the relevant dripping mucus on the mirror
nor the chaste notes rippling the flag. I like tumescence
as much as the next victim, but would prefer not to get
carried away on the back of some gryphon-steed as my tail feathers
wag toward the sky. I, not you, work conscientiously for
a million little dumb show matinees. Silent, they’re performed in
parking structures made from fiberglass and patience. Stalwart,
I tell you, they house forever-notes. Next time, get down.
Be careful with the perforated letter. She’ll unhouse you,
so close to the walkway as you are. The dappled smoke
seeping out of the sun connotes not requiems nor certainty.
Canned sentiment is perhaps killing our house pets. Or else
freedom has (perhaps) deleted our houseguests. The threshold
doesn’t mind the imperative I’m giving, the command from silent structures
to the trains that pass in the middle of the day, lonely on their eastward
wandering, and working toward dental transcendence, rollicking
their rhythm forward and through the densities of fine, trellised
woodwork. Post-arboretum sale, the delicacies purchased,
the light of them, their coma-inducing glare, capsized the moment.
Sure, queens of delight strode thoughtfully down lanes of embarkation,
distances folded together in their tresses, like panoplied andromedans,
like fore-warned, miscreant saboteurs on their way to endless satisfaction.
Thursday, April 14, 2016
Michelle Murphy / 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist
Michelle Murphy
[2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist]
[2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist]
Rift
I know the guttural urge to walk the fog, confusing it for heaven & rummage for brothers that have stepped barefoot from memory’s curb.
Which brings us back to this fog & the believers who shake salt over their shoulders like crumbs.
An errand can take you anywhere, even into the woods, a bridge of mothers’ voices calling through a flash flood where a path is cleared to better hear the names.
We are all unsolved; bartering for faith with whatever is at hand, hoping it’s enough to keep us at the table.
He hides his head but doesn’t sleep. A parachute of air and smoke gathered in the hem of his mouth.
You know how maps recite their borders then take on a language of ledgers, average in the floods the oil spilt and spilt & all the grief on loan.
The facts of our lives are waged. We throw down for a shot of whiskey, burn our throats sweet. Who says we can only occupy one room at a time?
Pacific, we lay our debts on the table, the kisses and threads, the bad advice we gave so freely.
Love is quick like this. We forgive ourselves when the rent is due & pride’s just not able.
You’ve seen how fickle breath is, are versed in satellites’ ways, how they stretch the truth until it hurts.
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalists
Over the next few weeks on the Verse site, we will be publishing excerpts from portfolios by some of the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalists, whose work will appear in the next edition of the print magazine. Each portfolio is 20-40 pages long.
Submissions for the 2016 Tomaž Šalamun Prize will open on May 1.
Monday, April 11, 2016
NEW! Short fiction by Joanna Ruocco
Joanna Ruocco
Defense of Marriage Act
Defense of Marriage Act
Sometimes even the best women pretend to be men. It is socially expedient to do so in certain
situations. The women pretend to be men
until the situation is over. Sometimes
they pretend for longer, so long that they get used to it and aren’t pretending. Then they have to pretend to be women
again. This creates confusion. We meet an exemplary woman, one of the very
best women, and sooner or later we realize that she’s pretending. She isn’t for real, but whether she’s a man
pretending to be a woman or a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a
woman we can’t be sure. If we could go
back to the beginning and establish the facts, using testimonies and also
photographic and documentary evidence, we might say, look here, she started out
as a man or he started out as a woman, we might settle the issue, but in the
beginning, there are parents and parents often pretend that their child is a
man or a woman, and why not? In the
beginning, their children really aren’t much. They aren’t men or women, they aren’t stockbrokers or teachers or
plumbers or store clerks, fathers or mothers, they’re balls of warm meat, tubes
of warm meat, chubby bundles of cytoplasm and diarrhea, and so their parents
have to pretend. They pretend the
cytoplasm is a little man or a little woman, like they had to pretend in
middle-school with the eggs or the bags of flour, this is my child, he is… she
is…. The parents call the cytoplasm by name, they try to connect the cytoplasm
with names. Very short names are best. Frederick always seems wrong at this
stage. Bartholomew, Jacquelyn. My mother, Georgia, is one of the very best
women, although she might be pretending. She told me the truth about my father, that my father is not a man. She told me my father is a sentient tree, a
barely sentient tree, or an inert gas, or a coma patient, a lump under a sheet
that doesn’t need the name its parents worked so hard to connect with it. She said I could pretend he was a man if I
wanted. I could pretend he was anything,
except a mother, except a good woman. He
wasn’t. He wasn’t ever. She was, my mother, a good woman. One of the best, the most believable. I never saw her otherwise. She said no matter what I had to keep in mind
there was a difference.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)