Michelle Poirier Brown

It is not yet time for singing.
Although I could allow this lake stroking the shore as song.

I feel a tenderness towards the small stones under my feet.
That's a good sign.

And gratitude for the sun warming my neck.

I am learning the names of birds.
At the pond last week,
a soft-colored green bird with a white stripe down its head.
A widgeon.

And just now, a small shore bird, black with hints of red at the back of its neck,
hops across the wave foam, pert and legged like a gymnast.
It has a name.

For praise, one needs vocabulary,
to know the difference between a call and a song,
and that birds that sing are among the passerines.
from the journal THE GREENSBORO REVIEW
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I wrote “Praise” during the early days of my husband’s recovery from alcoholism, at a poetry retreat in Ditidaht territory, on Vancouver Island. The afternoon assignment was “praise.” I grew up singing the halls of a Lutheran high school. Even when I left the church, I continued to meditate in song, sang to my children. The assignment made salient a silence I had not noticed, and was not yet ready to fill.

Michelle Poirier Brown on "Praise"
Black-and-white headshot of Jacques Rancourt
"A Conversation with Jacques Rancourt" 

The AIDS crisis of the late twentieth century haunts Jacques Rancourt's new book, Brocken Spectre. "In a lot of ways, so much of the progress of humanizing queer people was a direct result of the crisis. Part of it is also thinking about the ethics of memory: what right do we have to memorialize and remember, and what obligations do we have to memorialize and remember?"

via THE RUMPUS
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What Sparks Poetry: 
Heather Green on Dan Beachy-Quick's Stone-Garland


"Beachy-Quick introduces each poet, then 'sings another's song' through his translations, reifying each speaker's preoccupations, whether love or lust, revenge or financial ruin, aesthetic wonder or the transience of life. Throughout the book, we find all manner of fragments: poems torn in half, lines cut short mid-word, and other poems, according to Beachy-Quick, assembled from various incomplete texts, 'held together not by fact, but by resonance.'"
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