as magical utterance as roughage self-specified in opening form onto random scholarly dust thus asking myself the one-line equation of how astonishment boils
from the book Divine Blue Light / City Lights

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems.

In Books We’ve Loved, we asked our editorial board members and select guest editors to reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year, with the intention of creating a list of book recommendations for our valued readers.

Tiana Nobile on A. Van Jordan's <em>M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A: Poems</em>
Photo: Tiana Nobile
Eleni Sikelianos
for dream. Then I remembered language is a lingering we keep hoping will draw up exigence like water      from a well, metal...
A. Van Jordan
I ask again, where do the babies come from? And I'm snapped Back to the spelling bee as the announcer repeats Nemesis As two tongues dance like a poor child for change Behind his teeth.
Joyelle McSweeney
in your sleep you repeat the motion of advancing, retracting of flinging wide your nets to net the moon but like every tide you fail like a pulsing star you signal like a star you fail to hide behind your signal
Mariana Berenice Bredow Vargas (translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander)
we barely know, who hardly matter to us, words that only hide us from sorrow, forgive me                for saying so, but facing death, there’s just no place                              for dissimulation, and I can’t imagine what...

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