Noah Warren
The water shrugs, its heavy blindness.
Telephone wires scan and crease
cloud scud's bubbling lead,
their copper threads are empty now, web
of eerie interference, half-caught lyrics,
a sound like the ocean.

A sound like the ocean heard again
and again; a sound like a way of listening.
Salt drift drives through a puff of mist.
With the changing of the light
down the harbor boulevard
storms a torrent of quiet metal—

a metal torrent, which freezes
for another light, the cars magnesic
and pearlescent, sexual hearses like
black capsules of champagne.
They wait there steaming and red light
streaks them as if they were wet.

But they are not wet even after
this hour's rain; their shells forget,
and the eyes inside are the force of their forgetting,
lonely pilots. I have called you a friend
so we seem to both have lied
in service of a small idea:

small, silvering in the idea
did we lie together on a linen bier.
Not-us flowed through us, a thorn milk,
a blindness. When you swam from the world
I came with you. But you kept on; like mist,
you receded faster than I could.

If I lie, if I sleep,
I can still hear you receding. I listen
to the slender waves pulse the harbor

back and forth beneath small craft, never
strong enough to break, their force
gathered and relost.

Gathered and relost
between two gaunt long arms
of crushed stone.
from the book THE COMPLETE STORIES / Copper Canyon Press
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"Jetty" began during a time when the death of friends and family members had pulled me into depression; a recursive, obsessive mood. Though much of the sestina structure seems ornamental to me now, some features of it, including the way the form repeats a word at the end of one stanza and the beginning of another, helped me gather the experience of that time.

Noah Warren on "Jetty"
Color photograph of dog walkers in Leeds, England
"The Best Recent Poetry–Review Roundup"

David Wheatley reviews Thinking With Trees by Jason Allen-Paisant; The Craft of Poetry by Lucy Newlyn; Brilliant Corners by Nuzhat Bukhari; Forty Names by Parwana Fayyaz; and Auguries of a Minor God by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe

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Cover of Lauren Russell's book, Descent
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Yona Harvey on Lauren Russell's Descent 

"The result is a poetic, hybrid tour de force that delivers not only the assembled narrative, but accounts of creating the book itself: 'I came to this project in search of Peggy, but it is my life, too, my family’s life, I find expunged from the record.' Descent, after all, is Russell’s deep exploration of ancestry and historical omission."
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