Nostalgia
Poetry - the gilded tree that glitters in dusklight/like an upside-down chandelier (2/12/2025)

Witness. Target = Rubble
Poetry - “We thought there couldn’t be anything more./But hurricanes can collide with tornados, can join floods./Beautiful and horrific are the moment’s songs.” (2/7/2025)

Bruises Bloom Roses
Poetry - “Bruises bloom roses; the blind bird has fled./Ocean quiet bedroom night light turned dim,/the sting of his fist purple on her skin.” (2/4/2025)

The Speech of Herbs: Melissa Kwasny’s “The Cloud Path”
Essay - “Yet what might in lesser hands become mere effusions is tempered with a wise, sometimes steely, sometimes self-abnegating, sometimes mournful contemplative voice that speaks of philosophical and personal concerns combined…” (2/2/2025)

A Woodpecker Pecks
Poetry - “the specific iteration of woodpecker pecking at yet/another juicy place, but I forgot to pack the guidebook” (1/31/2025)

Villa 351
Poetry - “The news we got at first was dire,/the damage bad though not entire” (1/28/2025)

Hands Together Ghazal
Poetry - “Seek mercy for eggs we scrambled in a youth/spent banging pots and pans together./For the telling of clumsy lies, our voices/cracking like pecans together.” (1/24/2025)

Still in the Holler
Reflection - “If a stranger comes around, if he’s wise, he will keep to the road and announce his business soon, clearly and loudly, then you’ll see what’s what. You’re not against him, but you’re not automatically for him.” (1/22/2025)

The Buster’s Hand: Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s “Rodeo”
Essay - “In her exquisitely physical Rodeo, Sunni Brown Wilkinson takes her place among those superb modernists, early and late and post, who recognize the combination of mutability and continuity across poetic epochs that is a key to lyric’s continuing strength and relevance…” (1/19/2025)

Bruegel, Columbidae, and Walking Home
Poetry - “And then a tide of blood fell back in me/after that I walked with open ears/I found that the trees had voices, and/they sang like forgotten, sunless seas.” (1/17/2025)

Moon Bloom and Lithopedion
Poetry - “Night flower,/short-lived lover/of darkness,/offspring of cactus,/desert jewel/lulled awake/by moonbeams” (1/10/2025)

God’s in the Weeds: Daneen Bergland’s “The Goodbye Kit”
Essay - “Eve about to be cast out of the Garden kills as the mistress of straight-faced understatement. There is no fury, no rebuke, or if there is, it has not set in yet. Instead, we get rationalizing, looking on the bright side, and philosophical self-doubt.” (1/5/2025)

Down at the Ecoplex
Poetry - “Doom is there staring, everywhere/I go, like a brazen coyote/dead center of the road/half-starved so it doesn’t care anymore.” (1/3/2025)
