Brian Foley

For James Tate
Love is pulling her hair
out your mouth
forever or love is
leaving it there to
loathe on for

you
who left this strung
I've confused
belonging
with whom I belong to

what length goes left
in my chest
brambles into strings
that broadcast

a former moon
blown into a ring
circling round the thing
that destroyed it

Oh the hope of
a hair that we should someday meet
the tails of things

when you touch your temple
& feel a spot of cold air
then go looking for the one that left
a window open somewhere
from the book THERE MUST BE A REASON PEOPLE COME HERE / Black Ocean
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Back in '09 I attended UMass Amherst to know a bit of James Tate. First workshop I ever had with Jim I turned in some early version of this poem. I remember him listening carefully, letting everyone go through the lines, only for him to assert at the end, "Well, I don't know what it means, but I like it!" I never forgot that moment. Later, the character of his shared sentiment became the metaphysical stance of the speaker in this poem. 

 Brian Foley on "Violin"
Headshots of Douglas Kearney & Tolu Oloruntoba
Tolu Oloruntoba, Douglas Kearney Win 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize

"Oloruntoba won the $65,000 Canadian prize for The Junta of Happenstance (Anstruther Books/Palimpsest Press). In their citation, the jury said that Oloruntoba's poetry 'collides the language of revolution with the landscapes of the body'....Kearney was the winner of the $65,000 International prize for Sho (Wave Books), which was also a finalist for the National Book Award, Pen American, and Minnesota Book Award."

via QUILL AND QUIRE
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"I keep reading it because it makes me desire its inevitable cyborgs and monsters, its palpitated time-signatures, its 'pink dreaming riot.' I, too, want to get weaved in. Or—I am already weaved in, and desire a present, and future, that is livable with, and inclusive of, a chronic error-measure. Give me less of that narrative 'cure' imposed 'across an abrupt jumble of absences' and more of this speculative wildness."
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