Then, early one morning, as the night was thinning out; as — like a ball of alms rice whitened with yogurt in the hand of the mendicant called Time; like a lump of foam on the dark river of the night sky; like a fragment of the celestial nymph Menakā’s white crystal nail file; dappled as beautifully as a honeycomb

By the light of Psalm 151, we ask, what poet, writing now, is so ready for catastrophe as Rachel Blau DuPlessis? What living poet can so masterfully take up the Lurianic myth of the Breaking of the Vessels, do justice to its imaginative drama, fathom its complexities with an acute historical and critical awareness, yet sing this tale in a way that is both true to our secular moment, and true to the spiritual agonies at the heart of any such shattering as the tale tells.

Maybe now finally ink begins to flow into the nib of this Platignum calligraphy fountain pen I have not used probably since 1985. Yes maybe now finally. Maybe now. Maybe finally.

“I decided early that poetry is made of exact details.” Ultimately, in his poetry, [Flora’s] details are raised far beyond prosaic, everyday specification, simple catalogues of what make up, to use the title of one of his early books, The Physical World (1977).

The act of writing, as Mancinelli conceives of it, takes her into her darkroom, a “place of the unknown, where [her] demons nestle [and her] most tenacious and impenetrable shadows [can be found].”

Deliver what? Deliver truth? Deliver us? For a poet engaged in composing “the secular word,” there is something disturbingly messianic about Heller’s vision.

Selections from Intact (2018) by Claudia Masin, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers.

He was not a literary artist in the sense that his work doesn’t seem to wrestle with questions of form; he’s not attempting to reinvent the surrealist modes at his disposal but rather making use of them as vehicles for his insurgent imagination and apocalyptic vision, the fury of which elevates his writing above and beyond the mere assemblage of irrational word combinations.

As the partisan of energy as a form of imagination, Will Alexander relentlessly critiques linear conceptions of cause and effect, along with all mechanistic modalities of thought and practice.

Selections from Invisible by Jacek Gutorow, translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk.

When I looked up Barrax’s collections, I found that his work spans not only relatively traditional-looking lyrics, but formally experimental poems that disarrange syntax and disperse words across the page.

“I have yet to arrive / I will never arrive / in the center of everything is the poem / intact sun / inescapable night.”

“I have been wrong before, god of syntax / and understatement, god of slips in silk / and polyester, god of the laboratory, god of newsprint / and sunscreen”

Fagan’s poems ask us what kind of attention we pay to the world and if that attention pays off, whether or not the world pays us back with a measure of truth.

For Anvil and Rose 12, Inspector Watt returns with reviews of books from Paul Celan (tr. Pierre Joris), Jean Daive (on Celan), Alen Hamza, Lara Mimosa Montes, and a COVID anthology edited by Alice Quinn.

… the most important episode in the history of Nicaraguan poetry was the formation of the Vanguardia group, one of the last of the interwar avant-gardes and the only one to emerge in Central America.

Jack’s poetry asks you, the reader, to abandon yourself, to engage with what you don’t know, and can’t understand, and enter a path of transformative gnosis.

In this latest Anvil and Rose, Herman Van den Reeck reviews books from Rosebud Ben-Oni, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, Andres Cerpa, Andrew Levy, and Jackie Wang.

In this latest Anvil and Rose, Inspector Watt reviews books by Agustín Guambo, David Lehman, J. Michael Martinez, Maureen N. McLane, and Chelsey Minnis.

However outlandish the utterance, however devious the digression, or pained the disclosure, an Olson poem conveys and keeps a somber promise, that words will not fail.