Stephen Dunn
      After Neruda

When I say your hair
is the color of a moonless night
in which I've often been lost,
I mean approximately that dark.
And the dove outside our window
is no symbol, merely wakes us
at dawn, its mate a grayish creature
that coos quite poorly. Peace
is an entirely different bird.
The rose, to me, signifies the rose,
and the guitar signifies
a musical instrument
called the guitar. At other times
language is a slaughterhouse,
a hammering down, its subjects hanging
from hooks, on the verge
of being delicious. When I say
these things to you it's to watch
how certain words play
themselves out on your face,
as if no one with imagination
can ever escape being a witness.
The whale, for example, no matter
its whiteness, is just a mammal
posing as a big fish, except
of course if someone is driven
to pursue it. That changes everything.
Which is not to suggest I don't love
the depth of your concealments.
When I say your name over and over
it's because I cannot possess you.
from the book THE NOT YET FALLEN WORLD / W. W. Norton & Company
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Headshot of Guy Gunaratne, who will join Ali Smith and Jackie Kay as judges for Rathbones Folio prize in 2023
"Rathbones Folio Prize 'Refreshing Format'"
 
"For 2023, the prize will expand to three categories: fiction, nonfiction and poetry, with a winner named in each who will go on to compete for the overall prize....Organisers said they had 'decided to refresh its format to address the changing landscape of literary prizes, including the recent discontinuation of awards such as the Costa book awards, and the impact this has for writers.'"

via THE GUARDIAN
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Cover of Dolores Dorantes' Book, Copy
What Sparks Poetry:
Elisa Díaz Castelo on Dolores Dorantes' Copy

"These fragmented definitions, along with other phrases, iterate over and over in her poems. Are, indeed, copied. In its use of permutation, these poems seem to be written in the tradition of the pantoum or the villanelle. The obsessive repetition distinctive to those forms haunts Dorantes' work, but also the same mysterious and almost imperceptible progress, the piecemeal transformation of meaning."
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