Aero                                  die                       anima pumpkin

Dug drought                          archive                         so lute         solo lint

Genius                                 dooms me                    meadow           sweet

I candle                                  eructates ax                      omnivore and ipecac

Aero                   dug drought        genius I                          candle                                    

Eructates ax                          dooms me                    archive            die

Anima pumpkin so           lute solo lint          meadowsweet omnivore and ipecac

Gap                  closure                      loose eye                       ordinal threat

Does this                        through ewe                     parallax               riparian

Make twee                       larynx sews scree                incipit              stone tang glows

Crotch pine nepenthe                cross spine limps         sump                mustard foison

Mustard foison                           gap                           ordinal threat               make twee

Through ewe             stone tang glows                  crotch pine nepenthe      loose eye                       

Incipit                 does                  this cross limps spine                     sump sews

Riparian threat                   scree parallax                 ordinal closure                gap parallax

Lucas d Lima

Except for the last three lines, I really like “all i wanna say is that they don’t really care about us” up at the PEN website.  It's the most engaging poetry I've yet read by de Lima, whose penchant for all-caps lettering has never sparked my interest.  These poems are not stylized in that manner; rhetoric, rhythm, and image do their do--work--carry through.  All-caps, often, appears like a voice yelling from a stage and it's not strong enough to carry to the back-row--aka opera singer who lacks sufficient skill.  It's lovely to see timbre both delicate and possessed heft.  Hear-here--here-hears; cheers!

Howdy

Here's a description of a manuscript I very much want to get published:

Hello, it's Adam Strauss. I am submitting an 81 page (title, acknowledgements, and section pages excluded) poetry manuscript titled Braided Sand Country. Both sections of this collection--Braided Sand and Country respectively--primarily consist of sequences, but these strands are not ordered sequentially and instead constantly interrupt and/or twine one another. This dynamic has been chosen in order that relation be emphasized but not simplified, turned step-by-step--elegantly straightforward--rather than web, matrix, field of lapses, overlaps, integers, gaps that turn into rungs, ladders for lungs to scale and set circulation free. The content of these poems works to define as fully as possible what country means: how the term compasses the "natural world," fields, mountains, streams, coastlines; designates the small-scale, the local, the "provincial," and the large stage that is the nation-state; how geography turns into geopolitics and framing for culture. In the pleated reality of this term, mountains are no longer solely mountains: they are zones for extracting product for export, for GDP growth; they are contested territories--shadows cast by their peaks are themselves shadowed by ongoing eructations constituting nation-states' (or, sigh, perhaps only states') identities.

I'm Unsure

if it's Lowe or Low; I've read it both ways--but am guessing it's Low?  Purposefully unfixed?
I don't want to disrespect her through incorrect spelling.

T Low

 I like her Hunting Season performance that I just watched at Jacket2.  I don't think I would
want to read it, but it's delicious to watch.  The only bit that fell flat for me is the end--which
makes perfect sense: it's in many ways very much a continuous present mode, so any ending
is bound to ring dully.  It's very artifice-laden, but it does what performance modes almost
never achieve--to register as actual event/eructation, sans script; I didn't know the start was
the start: I thought it was her introductory remarks!  Too often, when I see people read writing,
they seem to act like they're following how they think performance should come off and what one
gets, for me, seems like an imitation of performance rather than performance; hmm, or am I
just detailing how shitty acting ends up?  Anyways, Low's performance doesn't follow this
dynamic.  And Yah, I seem to be privileging reading performance which actually seems like
someone speaking in a way that could even remotely plausibly occur outside that particular
stage scenario.

What I Have Read This Past Hour or So

Frequently, I find author/artist's statements/explanations of their creations tedious/grandiose/self-serving, obfuscating/misleading and, most devastatingly---boring! This is not the case with Monica Youn's essay which regards her poem "Blackacre" which I read a few months ago while at the Barnes and Noble on US 1 in Fort Lauderdale, FL (I love going there for coffee so I can read magazines while I wake up).  I immediately felt/thought the poem terrific: I love thinking of Milton as a poet who makes other major poets look comically minor (in other words, I love thinking of him in rather cartoonish figurations) and "Blackacre" writes not through nor over  but rather with Milton's sonnet "On His Blindness," a poem I'm not even an idolater of.  And now having just read Youn's exegesis, I know what Blackacre means, and that the poem stems/circles around the fact that she was infertile.  This makes amazing sense once she's written to me, but I totally never imagined that subject when I was happily going through/with it at B and N.

I also read #Actual Asian Poets, a collocation of homages up at Literary Hub.  I find this to be exciting in terms of the general cultural contours it creates, but not (with a few exceptions) cognitively engaging in any specific way: mostly it reads to me like an anthology of blurbs.  Perhaps quite contradictorily, I ADORE blurbs, so don't mean to cast undue aspersion.

Finally, I read Mia You's essay-at the Poetry Foundation blog--regarding her pregnancy and specifically her attempt to establish what constitutes being in labor--what timeline most accurately contours the experience.  I love this piece.  Most notable, for me, is that it is--though ultimately the work documents markedly difficult realities--quite funny in places, and I sense that I as reader have been led to carry this response due to You's fully intended effort.

Quoting a Plum--or Perhaps Chestnut--by Joshua Corey

Here's a funny allusion to F O'Hara by Joshua Corey in his poem "The Barons":

"I think I’ll buy a malted for the writers in Ghana these days"

--New World Writing indeed, lol.