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Paco Márquez on "Cool Breeze"

The first draft of this poem came at a good time for me. My second year at NYU's MFA was about to start. I had wanted for decades to move to New York City. The chronic pain I had been living with for...

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Michael Kasper on Paul Colinet's "The Bike"

Paul Colinet (1898-1957) was a Belgian Surrealist writer, of delightful prose poems, mostly. Like other authors in that distinctive grouplet, Colinet's work was little published in his lifetime and...

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Alicia Jo Rabins on "Geode"

During my high school days in the early 90's, there was a fad called the Master Cleanse. Perhaps it still exists. It was a sort of potion which was supposed to have extreme purging effects: water,...

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Tishani Doshi on "A Fable for the 21st Century"

I'd been thinking about the idea of knowledge versus information for some years. The poem grew out of a frustration of being bombarded with constant news — such as, will the Duchess of Cambridge give...

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Sarah Gambito on "I Am Not From The Philippines"

Only someone from the Philippines would so resolutely irresolutely say they are not from the Philippines.

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Bridget Talone on "Emotional Lady"

I was able to find the energy of "Emotional Lady" through a collage-like process of ordering and reordering different fragments of language and seeing how they interacted and moved as a whole. The...

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Paola Capó-García on "Yellow"

When I was young, I actually did think the soul was a body part. I chalk this up to not understanding abstraction at a young age. Everything was literal to me. I thought that because my mother was...

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Claire Wahmanholm on "Advent"

I wrote this poem on inauguration day 2017—about a month after the actual Advent season. The poem isn't necessarily about the holiday itself, though it is laden with a sense of waiting (or, if I'm...

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Derek Mong "To Assemble This Poem Properly"

Some poems are gifts; others are edicts. I knew a pilot once, a modern-day Hermes, who flew donated organs between hospitals. He was a young guy, a former student, and long after we lost touch I'd...

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Jessica Laser on "The Rock"

"The Rock" is not the earliest poem inÂSergei Kuzmich from All SidesÂbut it is the first – the poem that announced that the book was coming. I wrote a draft of it on a mostly empty subway car, going to...

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Some Notes on Intoxication and Simile

If my mother had not been an alcoholic, I might not have been a poet. My mother's alcoholism underwrote a great deal of the writing in my first books

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Emily O’Neill on "it’s too dangerous to tell the truth all at once"

I worked at the same coffee shop for a large portion of my twenties, in the Kendall Square neighborhood of Cambridge, a few minutes' walk from the MIT campus. I hesitate to call this the poorest period...

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Adrienne Su on Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan

Claire could not have intended the resonance with the context in which this chapbook appears. Her illness and death came quickly and unexpectedly, in the prime of her working life. Healthy and in her...

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Stephanie Young on “Ave | Via”

The first version of "Ave | Via" included an epigraph from Jenny Holzer and a lot of sentences. The sentences were about foreclosure, development, student debt, and adjunct labor. About feeling unable...

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Rob Schlegel on "52 Trees"

The morning of March 20th, 2018 I woke up with the words "52 Trees" buzzing in my head. It felt like the title to a poem that was already growing somewhere inside me. But who planted the seed? Was it...

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Ed Bok Lee on "The Desert vs. the Sea"

Many years ago, I spent some time at a Buddhist temple in South Korea. This was around the time I finally returned half of my father's ashes back to our ancestral mountain in Chungcheong Province....

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Per Diem Press

Per Diem Press is an independent publisher dedicated to elegance, ferocity, and bewilderment, funded by cash given to the proprietor whilst visiting the set of a filmed adaptation of his work. The...

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Jaswinder Bolina on "Pornograph, with Americana"

I wanted to get the words into my poem that nobody else would think to put into their poems. Certainly, those words make plain certain artifacts of ethnicity, race, and culture, but I have trouble with...

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Andrea Rexilius on "Andrea / Hem"

I wrote "Andrea / Hem" as an exercise in listing all of the poignant memories I had of early life with my sister. I had been attempting to create a book-length prose narrative about our lives together...

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Erín Moure on translating Lupe Gómez's Camouflage

Camouflage is a hidden text that obscures nothing. It is a tender, beautiful, stubborn salute to Galician memory and life, a recognition of a poverty—povera—that is an avant-garde for it is both social...

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Emily Pettit on "TO LEAVE HALF A MIND IS A GIFT YOU SOMETIMES GIVE YOURSELF"

This poem was built as sort of a grief kaleidoscope. Something working to sort and scatter different interior patterns of pain and exterior patterns of perspective. Over a three year period a number of...

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Diannely Antigua on "Something Dies in Me Every Month"

I often think about breath, or rather the moments that seemingly take away my ability to do what my body does naturally without conscious effort—a kiss, a car accident, a panic attack—my breath...

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NEW-GENERATION AFRICAN POETS: A CHAPBOOK BOX SET (SITA).

I am interested in the ways that the traditions of the past are being challenged and ignored and the ways that they are engaged by a sense that someone may have dropped the ball in the business of...

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Jake Skeets "The Body a Bottle"

The poem began with a body and a bottle. It was late afternoon and I was driving back home from my summer residency at the Institute of American Indian Arts. The drive was several hours through high...

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Kristin Dykstra on Amanda Berenguer’s “Avec les gemissements graves du...

By the time Amanda Berenguer (b. 1921) passed away in 2010, she had created a startling range of poems. Her first complete collection appeared in 1940. The last was published in the year of her death.

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