Each Wednesday, Editor's Choice brings you a poem from a new book selected as a must-read. Our feature editor this week is Brian Teare.
Zaina Alsous

There was occupation, a market for tracing, clouded October and open fire, there was text flattened into macabre telescope, an orchestra of stolen petrified skulls, there was tombs made civic hand-drawn cattle splayed in spectrums of gray, there was afterword—New World Order of sunsets, a sugar plantation and a French slave master’s son, there was a fixation of birds, there was a hobby of arranging murdered muses with wire to be painted exactly like this, there was a book of the dead named Birds of America, an incident of canon, there was grove air, there was turpentine, orange and harvest, and piles and piles of indentured coiling, there was Syrian Christians petitioning against Yellow to better own houses, there was stacks of pledges and dictionaries without song, a refugee crisis and a father with a flag pin, there was a daughter and her pages of class mobility, there was hours of wrists and balconies and inadequate protest, there was an inquiry into how the green lawn occurred, there was a poet trying to retrace a book of the dead, she entered many cities portending a crow in spring, wearing a dress glimmering of sweatshops, she asked the tarot reader in New Orleans for clues: The corpses in you are damaged, but they have a lot to say.

from the book A THEORY OF BIRDS /The University of Arkansas Press 
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W. H. Auden writing at a desk below a lamp
"Now Is the Perfect Time to Memorize a Poem" 

"I have always found the place for the genuine in poetry to be unlocked not by just reading it but by memorizing it. And it’s a good exercise, in the midst of chaos, to give yourself over to a sound and a rhythm that is not your own....you feel poems differently when you get them by heart and say them out loud. You have to chew them, and their rhythms overpower yours."

viaTHE CUT
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Cover of the book, The Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger
What Sparks Poetry:
Gillian Parrish on Paul Celan's "In the Daytime"

"This poem also expands my view of poem-making as a practice of attention to include poem as communion, as something more like prayer. Clearly, Celan’s poem is a poem of attention. Better yet, it is a poem that attends without wanting, that rests in a ready waiting-that-is-not-waiting. For only in such an open space can wildness arrive and minds meet."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
For Writers Over 50: Passager Poetry Contest 
Deadline May 10

Winner receives $1,000 and publication, and honorable mentions are published. $20 reading fee includes 1-year subscription to Passager Journal. Submit 5 poems, 40-line max each, cover letter, bio, reading fee, SASE/e-mail for results. No previously published work. Send by snail mail or Submittable. See PASSAGER BOOKS for complete guidelines.
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