An excerpt from Losarc Raal’s quasi-novella No Material, forthcoming from Black Sun Lit in 2023

Sometimes, when the origin of ideas of the sublime and the beautiful / are struck by lightning, I root into the hail of stones / at the precise center of the world / and sink into that dust.

To simply be a part of the changing afternoon light  The old man I see / in my visions is composed of all the days / in between  Your sense/awareness of who you are cannot be confined within / language  You go up to Medicine Bow / and open the sky and step through

A selection from Bret Schneider’s poetry cycle, Poems of the Drone Years

Jonathan Galassi and Robyn Creswell discuss editing the FSG Poetry Anthology with Austin Carder and Aaron Fagan.

Better a handful / of calm than / two of clutching / at the wind….

Two new poems by Joel Newberger, read at the Caesura issue 1 event.

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.

“Art has to have a sense of pleasure and danger, of stretching limitations and perceptions.”

“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).

I want to follow the paths of the stars, I tell myself. But this is not true. I want them to follow me. After all, the Earth is the center of the universe, and, as I am the center of the Earth, the universe revolves around me.

Three poems by Rainer J. Hanshe.

Eight poems from Matvei Yankelevich’s cycle From a Winter Notebook, accompanied by Hannah Whitaker’s photographs.

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.

“Imagine an encounter that goes unreported by language.”