NEW! Poem by Adam Strauss

Adam Strauss

DEAR


Dear is all I know.
A party I'm not at.
Bliss of solitude--
A room rude to company:
I cannot have guests
Unless they insist;
I'm convinced
My friends didn't, don't, judge;
I wish my nature was
Tidy, not seemingly
Rigged to deflect
Society--what are those islands like?

NEW! Poem by Marcus E. Darnell

Marcus E. Darnell

GLASS

Glass petals from a glass rose
tremble down my tongue.
It told me to partake
its brittle, wristy, sugar face.
Its pollen rumbles in my lungs.
I cough shards delicately.
I scar my windows just by touching--
my armpits shatter just by reaching,
sprinkly eyelids wingedly there,
sheltering crystal eyeballs,
eyebrows snow-ghost hair.

I flake into a snowstorm, the sky agrees.
The sun, a magnifying bird,
magmafies my looking-glass heart.
I meteor stormless to the seas,
deprived of poisonous legacy
or recyclable soul.
The impact cuts my fire apart.

I am a cup of stomach sand,
a diamond-studded S.O.S.
Without my bulbs’ sexing
the darkness will cry.
My filament needs tender fixing--
I don’t want to die,
but alone and castle-dark one may try.
That none see me in fractures
I cannot forgive.
That my eyes are rubies in pictures
is no blood urge to live.

It is the purgatory of glass--
I am the transparent colossus
worshipped too long.
They pray right through my cracks,
recount irrelevant pain with stonehenge song.
They only know me as a dome,
I’m not half the cat’s eye I used to be.
I’m not the chip that bloomed to storm
or the coal that souled the sea.

I’m a funereal liquid too slow to fall,
an unhooded angel animal standing tall.
They mistake my rainbows for keys or cues
to commence my chiseled dissection,
but these hues are not heaven clues,
they are my screaming refractions.

I’m a country far away as flesh,
engraved into provinces senseless.
I would have been content to be
one step removed from shatter,
maybe hairline,
not holy fallen stone condemned to plain.

I wish I had found a middle--
not as a wrenching gust of northing glass dust
nor a plexi-doll worshipped spectrally,
just a glittered hump in the rain
without windshield, bubble, scratch or stain,
no blinding span of ache, name,
or enlightening, imprisoning riddle.

new issue: French poetry & poetics

new triple issue of Verse on French poetry & poetics

edited by Andrew Zawacki and Abigail Lang

with contributions by

Emmanuel Hocquard
Caroline Dubois
Jean Frémon
Jacqueline Risset
Dominique Fourcade
Oscarine Bosquet
Jacques Roubaud
Bénédicte Vilgrain
Pierre Alferi
Craig Dworkin
Olivier Cadiot
Jean-Jacques Poucel
Anne Portual
Christophe Tarkos
Suzanne Doppelt
Claude Royet-Journoud
Anne Parian
Sébastien Smirou
Philippe Jaccottet
Kevin Hart
Frédéric Forte and Ian Monk
Michelle Grangaud
Marie Borel


translated by

Steve Evans
Jennifer Moxley
Rod Smith
Cole Swensen
Peter Consenstein
Sarah Riggs
Omar Berrada
Guy Bennett
Eleni Sikelianos
Keith Waldrop
Anna Moschovakis
Rosmarie Waldrop
Beverley Bie Brahic
Chet Wiener
Micaela Kramer
Jennifer K. Dick
Andrew Zawacki
Judith Bishop


& reviews of

Stéphane Mallarmé by Timothy Donnelly
Charles Baudelaire by Tom Thompson
Edmond Jabès, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Steven Jaron by Michael Heller
Jean Grosjean by Ted Pearson
Two Worlds: French and American Poetry in Translation by Nathalie Stephens
Claude Royet-Journoud by Rusty Morrison
Jacques Roubaud by Beverley Bie Brahic
Suzanne Doppelt by Eduardo Cadava
Valère Novarina by Antoine Cazé
Olivier Cadiot by Eleni Sikelianos
Esther Tellermann by Dawn-Michelle Baude
Anne-Marie Albiach by Peter Ramos
Gérard Macé by Judith Bishop
Serge Fauchereau by Laird Hunt
Jean Frémon by Chris McDermott
Claire Malroux by Kevin Craft
Emmanuel Moses by Andrea Stevens
Yves Bonnefoy by Paul Kane
Jacques Réda by Chad Davidson
Michel Deguy by Michael Fagenblat
Jean-Michel Maulpoix by Jacques Khalip
Valérie-Catherine Richez, Marie Borel, Isabelle Garron by Kristin Prevallet
Marie Borel by Nicholas Manning
Pascalle Monnier, Jean-Michel Espitallier by Marcella Durand


365 pages

special blog price: $12 postage-paid through November 15

send check to:

Verse
English Department
University of Richmond
Richmond VA 23173