Leah Naomi Green
that color is not color. The red flower,
she tells me, absorbs all light
but red, so reflects red
where she and I can see it.

Daughter, I call her, Pulse
of Light, Prism of Many Faces I Know,
so many I don't.
You are Particular, Wave
of the one, deep
ocean
. And she absorbs it all,

except daughter — which reflects back
to my eye, radiant and factual
as any prayer, named
for the very thing it cannot hold.
from the journal VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW
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This relationship between light and color (which my daughter learned from a kids' podcast) parallels my relationship with language—especially the language I use for her and her sister, the people closest to and furthest from my grasp. Though the name daughter does "factually" represent her, it never touches her. It is a result of all the other, non-apprehensible names—"infranames," (if you will)—which she absorbs.

 Leah Naomi Green on "Somewhere, she's learned"
Image of Jana Prikryl
A Conversation with Jana Prikryl

"Dreams became an important engine for these poems, in part because I was excited by the formal problem they presented. I've always felt vaguely embarrassed by poems based on dreams (a few appear in both of my previous books, and make me oddly uncomfortable), so in Midwood I decided to plow this furrow very deliberately. That's also because much of the book was written in the first year of the pandemic, when my dreams became something like a social outlet, the most unpredictable part of my day/night."

via
MCSWEENEY'S
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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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