Open the sill’s eaves.

Swallow a lump in your throat.

Text-message obituary unopened

& still.

Four poems from the Israeli poet Ortsion Bartana, translated from the original Hebrew by Hana Inbar and Robert Manaster.

A fly will strike its head ninety times

before it finds an open window.

Photographs are often intimate artifacts, heirlooms, and a means by which our mortality is tracked and recalled. Many of our contemporary rituals around memory use photographs as a conjuring mechanism to reanimate the past. A timely hybrid-genre text, Museum of the Americas by J. Michael Martinez interrogates the white gaze and how the curation of the archive is another palimpsestic layer of control and power.

Three poems from Italian poet Franco Buffoni, translated by Moira Egan.

These poems from Sara Shagufta’s book Aankhein and translated from the original Urdu by Arshi Yaseen.

How could you know it would be like this:
touching the keys of a piano
and not finding a sound about it

Before the beds went away
There were bedtimes

In this interview with emerging and award-winning poet and Columbia MFA alumna Susannah Nevison, Nevison talks about disability, mass incarceration, and her upcoming collection, Lethal Theater (Ohio State University Press, 2019). Nevison is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Sweet Briar College.

The last bees form a cloud that fills
the sky. One dies and then
another, little motor of the brain

My kneecap is a magnet for mosquitos.
They assemble under the picnic pavilion
And form a small cloud, the shape of a Pierre’s

In this interview, the poet Mary Ann Samyn talks about her first encounters with Emily Dickinson’s work, her best advice for writing students, and her new collection, Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance, out now from 42 Miles Press.

Laughing babies all over the wall
The moment you set your eyes on them
after waking up in the morning,

Why does my body ache
more than ever now
Not just because I am rounding

My daughter’s sleep / wave machine
becomes a granular datum of cheer

Lemon Swarm
It is summer’s end, lurid and mutable.
The black pigs graze acorns in semi-freedom.
Perhaps my need to appear

The house is endless only in its emptiness, so vast
there seemed trapped the wind itself. And what this woman wants

Poetry and death have always had a close, paradoxical relationship. The death of poetry, the poetry of death, the Dead Poets Society: what are these phrases if not elegant misnomers? Poetry, after all, is so life affirming, so full of beauty and truth, isn’t it? The further we wade into these texts, and the poets behind them, the more we come to realize, suddenly, that poetry cannot save us from our own demise. Almost all poems confront the end, whether explicitly or not. The only remaining question is: how?

From a series of digital photo-collage pieces entitled BOOK OF NO LEDGE. In my dialogue with this encyclopedia (circa 1947), I attempt to marry a bit of poetry with the know-it-all simplifier of the universe, voice. Besides altering the text, I often add other graphic bits and refine to my own purposes all that had been in the vast before.