Tag: poetry community
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microreview: Slingshot by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson
review by José Angel Araguz There’s a moment toward the end of the sequence “a machine of mahogany and bronze I” in Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s debut poetry collection Slingshot (Nightboat Books) where, in the aftermath of a protest demonstration broken up by police brutality, the speaker is asked “You heard about the storm comin’?” which prompts […]
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José & the unintended hiatus + interview
First and foremost, apologies for the radio silence. Totally unintended. A lot of life has happened, good and bad. It has been strange not being here in this space. I look forward to doing a bit more now that I’m getting life in order. I’ve got a few reviews in the works as well as […]
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writer feature: Yahia Lababidi & Laura Kaminski
This week’s poem was drawn from the feature submissions! For guidelines on how to submit work, see the “submissions” tab above. * Happy to be sharing a collaborative poem this week by two poet friends: Yahia Lababidi and Laura Kaminski. Collaborative poems create such singular reading experiences, the meeting of two sensibilities creating another sensibility performed […]
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one more from Lynn Otto
In my recent microreview & interview of Lynn Otto’s Real Daughter (Unicorn Press, 2019), I noted some of the ways in which Otto’s poetic sensibility is able to take readers into the liminal space in which words make their meanings as well as gesture toward other imaginative possibilities. Within the traditions of lyric poetry — traditions whose […]
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microreview & interview: Real Daughter by Lynn Otto
review by José Angel Araguz It seems simple to say that what words can point to and hold is a constant source of meditation for me and other poets. Yet, this type of meditation is a high stakes one as it is in contemplating what words can hold that one also necessarily reckons with what […]
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poetry feature: Chelsea Bunn
This week’s poems are drawn from the poetry feature submissions! For guidelines on how to submit work, see the “submissions” tab above. * This week I’m excited to share a poem by Chelsea Bunn. I’m always a fan of poems that are able to evoke through juxtaposition. In “Missed Connections” (below), what is being juxtaposed is the […]
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recent writings
Been busy with life and emotional happenings, but am hoping to get back into the swing of Influence-related things. Thank you to everybody who read my latest post and would-have-been speech! I greatly appreciate it. I continue to be grateful to have been a finalist. One of the boons has been getting to be featured […]
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one more from Susan Lewis
In my recent microreview & interview of Zoom (The Word Works, 2018) by Susan Lewis, I discussed Lewis’ deftness with the prose poem as working through a push-pull between familiarity and distinction. The traditional structures of sentence and paragraph are subverted in the poems of Zoom with non-traditional phrasing and concepts. In the case of “In Praise of […]
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anting with Charles Simic
A lot of what makes poetry work is accumulation of meaning and possibility. In this week’s poem, “Solitude” by Charles Simic, the meaning begins with the phrase “first crumb” and how a crumb’s insignificance is gestured at before being subverted in the rest of the poem. It’s a move similar to starting zoomed out on […]
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suggestion via Rita Dove
Suggestion is a key element to poetry. Whether it’s a matter of word choice, how using the word “broken,” say, suggests its opposite, “fixed”; or within the structure of a metaphor itself, the juxtaposition of two things bringing to mind a further connection, suggestion is one word for poetry’s ability to tap into language’s conspiratorial […]
The Friday Influence 