This poem is part of a new series that investigates and plays with the meanings of “quintessence,” from medieval philosophy to modern-day physics to everyday speech/pop culture (where the adjectival form “quintessential” is common). While the poems vary in subject and tone, they’re all written in five-line stanzas or quintets, with alternating indented lines—this form engages an overarching theme of how one knows, how one presents and organizes knowledge, and where the gaps lie, glittering with life.
Chen Chen on "Quintessence: the Quotidian" |
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"Short Conversations with Poets: Megan Fernandes"
"In her third collection of poems, I Do Everything I’m Told, there is something else flowing under the dazzling surfaces, the ribald talk, the dancing in and out of narrative: there is a profound engagement with the question of history. Personal, political, global. The question of history might seem a dry one, but as Fernandes demonstrates, it is perhaps the question—as alive and twisted and full of lust and disaster as any human life or community."
via MCSWEENEY'S |
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Andrew Bertaina on Courtney LeBlanc's "Her Whole Bright Life"
"I have always been attracted to visceral writing, that which cuts through or illuminates life as it is lived. Perhaps raising children has made me less patient with ornamentation for its own sake. So, I was delighted to sink into LeBlanc’s world, poems about the death of her father and her relationship to her body, poems that are raw and unvarnished in their honesty about grief, about loss, about the management of the body, all those things we cannot ever really control but still try desperately to." |
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