This poem was written towards the end of a year I spent with my family in Oaxaca, Mexico. There, “torito” was the familiar name for Xyloryctes jamaicensis, the large, glossy “rhinoceros beetle,” which appeared suddenly, in great numbers, towards the end of the dry season.
Mark Levine on "Los Toritos" |
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Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky: In the Hour of War
This anthology of contemporary poetry from Ukraine captures a nation at war. "It includes soldier poets, rock-star poets, poets who write in more than one language, poets whose hometowns have been bombed and who have escaped to the West, poets who stayed in their hometowns despite bombardments, poets who have spoken to parliaments and on TV, poets who refused to give interviews, poets who said that metaphors don’t work in wartime and poets whose metaphors startle."
via LITHUB |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Allison Cobb on "For love"
"As a writer, I have been obsessed with the complexities of my origins, having been born and raised in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the town that built the first atomic bombs, and which remains the location of one of the nation’s three main nuclear weapons labs. Planetary legacies of damage and death stem from this place. How did this happen?" |
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