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1. Letter from the Editors

Dear Readers,

This week our prose series continues with "Celan's Deathfugue and the Eternal Feminine," by Alicia Ostriker, from the Fall issue of The Massachusetts Review:

"I am writing this essay to unravel what is for me a mystery: in a poem already stunning in its force, why do its final two lines seem to me not simply powerful but immeasurably deep? Why is it that when I try to say these lines aloud, either in German or in English, my voice cracks and my eyes fill with tears? What is haunting me?"

Look for it here.

Enjoy this week's poems!

Warmest regards,

Don Selby & Diane Boller

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2. Sponsor Messages

 Wake Forest University Press proudly announces our fall titles.
David Wheatley’s The President of Planet Earth brings an experimental sensibility to bear on questions of land and territory, channeling the messianic ambitions of modernism into rich and subversive comedy. Frank Ormsby, in The Darkness of Snow, covers vast territory in five parts, from meditations on art to insightful poems on life with disease. And in his eleventh collection, Angel Hill, Michael Longley explores familiar Irish landscapes as well as vignettes from the Western Scottish Highlands. http://wfupress.wfu.edu/

 2017 UNT Rilke Prize
Wayne Miller's Post-, published by Milkweed Editions, has won the 2017 UNT Rilke Prize. The $10,000 prize recognizes a book written by a mid-career poet and published in the preceding year that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision. 

The judges also selected three finalists for this year's Rilke Prize: Christopher Bakken's Eternity & Oranges (University of Pittsburgh Press), Ruth Ellen Kocher's Third Voice (Tupelo Press), and Dana Levin's Banana Palace (Copper Canyon Press).

 Vermont College of Fine Arts MFAs in Writing
Vermont College of Fine Arts offers a traditinal low-residency MFA in Writing program—now celebrating its 35th year—along with a residential MFA in Writing & Publishing program.

 ellipsis...literature and art
Accepting submissions until November 1. Honoraria and a prize judged by Srikanth Reddy. https://ellipsis.submittable.com/submit

 Palm Beach Poetry Festival
January 15-20, 2018, Delray Beach, Florida 
Deadline to apply for workshops: November 10
Workshops, readings, interview, gala and performance events with Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Chard deNiord, Beth Ann Fennelly, Ross Gay, Rodney Jones, Phillis Levin, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Tim Seibles. Admission is by application. For more information, visit www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org or email srw@palmbeachpoetryfestival.org

 Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins
Write the next chapter of an epic.
Talented faculty. Visiting writers. Writer-in-Residence.
Graduate Assistantships, Teaching Fellowships,
Travel Funding, and Full Scholarships. 

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing
More than fifty years of achievement in poetry,
Fiction, and nonfiction. 

Bachelor of Arts with concentration or Minor in creative writing
Where students mature into authors. 

Most of all, a vibrant, supportive community.
https://hollinsmfa.wordpress.com/first-child/

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3. Poetry News Links

News and reviews from around the web, updated daily:

• Richard Wilbur, 96 (The New York Times)
• Rebecca Foust introduces Phillis Levin's "Kettle." (Women's Voices for Change)
• Kaveh Akbar interviews Layli Long Soldier. (Divedapper)
• James Crews introduces "First Photo," by Kieron Winn. (The Times Literary Supplement)
• Anthony Madrid on his unplanned path to a translation of a poem from the Shijing, the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry. (Paris Review Daily)
• When Dana Gioia was appointed Poet Laureate of California he set out to visit and read in every single county in the state. (BBC Radio 3)
• And more...

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4. New Arrivals

These new arrivals are available for purchase via Poetry Daily/Amazon.com.

• Collected Poems, Dennis O'Driscoll (Carcanet Press)
• The World of Multicongruencies We Tend to Inhabit Increasingly, Albert Goldbarth (New Michigan Press)
• Stay, Andrew Jamison (Gallery Books)
• Some Say the Lark, Jennifer Chang (Alice James Books)
• A Scattering and Anniversary, Christopher Reid (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Little Climates, L. A. Johnson (Bull City Press)
• Noir, Tony Towle (Hanging Loose Press)
• Galaxies, Cathryn Hankla (Mercer University Press)
• Anthropocene Blues, John Lane (Mercer University Press)
• Sharps Cabaret, Katy Giebenhain (Mercer University Press)
• A Memory of Manaus, Catharine Savage Brosman (Mercer University Press)
• Contested Terrain, D. A. Gray (FutureCycle Press)
• Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees, Laren McClung and Yusef Komunyakaa, ed.s (W. W. Norton & Company)
• The Tattooist's Chair, Karl Riordan (Smokestack Books)
• Poets and the Algerian War, Francis Combes, ed., Alan Dent, tr. (Smokestack Books)
• Dreampaths of a Runaway, Louise C. Callaghan (Salmon Poetry)
• Where the Lost Things Go, Anne Casey (Salmon Poetry)
• Two Halves of the World Apple: Poems by Yang Ke, Yang Ke, tr. Denis Mair; Chao; Simon Patton; Ouyang Yu; Ning Yang (University of Oklahoma Press)
• Between Dog and Wolf, David Hathwell (David Robert Books)
• Breath and Bone, Bettina T. Barrett (Cherry Grove Collections)
• AND MORE

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5. This Week’s Featured Poets

The work of the following poets will appear as Today's Poem on the days indicated:

Monday - J. Allyn Rosser
Tuesday - Lisa Olstein
Wednesday - Anne Michaels
Thursday - Albert Goldbarth
Friday - Philip Schaefer
Saturday - Nicole Cooley
Sunday - Yrsa Daley-Ward

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6. Featured Poets October 9, 2017 - October 15, 2017

These and other past featured poets may be found in our archive:

Monday - Mark Waldron
Tuesday - William Logan
Wednesday - John Freeman
Thursday - Ted Kooser
Friday - Declan Ryan
Saturday - Harry Bauld
Sunday - Fadwa Soleiman

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7. Last Year’s Featured Poets

These poems will be retired from our archive during the coming week.

Mark Wagenaar, "Midwest Blues Leave Me Shining"
Paisley Rekdal, "Irises"
Ishion Hutchinson, Two Poems
Taije Silverman, "The Boy with the Bolt"
Mary Stewart Hammond, "Starting Over After Long Estrangement"
Mikko Harvey, "Visions"
Susan Wicks, "Runner"

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8. Poem From Last Year

After the Hurricane

After the hurricane walks a silence, deranged, white as the white helmets
of government surveyors looking into roofless

shacks, accessing stunned fowls, noting inquiries
into the logic of feathers, reversed, like gullies still retching; they scribble facts

about fallen cedars, spread out like dead generals on leaf
medallions; they draw tables to show the shore

has rearranged its idea of beauty for the resort
villas, miraculously not rattled by the hurricane's—

call it Cyclops—passage through the lives
of children and pigs, the one eye that unhooked

banjos from the hills, smashed them in Rio Valley;
they record how it howled off to that dark parish

St. Thomas, stomping drunk with wire lashes and cramps,
paralyzing electric poles and coconut trees,

dishing discord among neighbours, exposed,
standing among their flattened, scattered lives for the first time.

It passed through Aunt May's head, upsetting
the furniture, left her chattering something,

a cross between a fowl and a child; they can't say
how it tore down her senses, no words, packing

their instruments, flies returning to genuflect
at their knees, on Aunt May's face, gone soft;

no words, except: Don't fret, driving off,
as if they had left better promises to come.

Ishion Hutchinson
House of Lords and Commons
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2016 by Ishion Hutchinson
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission