The photo I reference in this poem is the only image I have ever seen of myself with my mother and father. The plastics, silver halide emulsion, and various chemicals and dyes that made the Polaroid image have broken down and reacted with air and light and moisture over time, slowly replacing the artifact of family with corrosive waves that threaten to destroy the image, but beautifully. The poem assays the instability of family, and a longing to restore or return to something that never actually existed.
Jules Gibbs on "X" |
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"A Conversation with Charif Shanahan"
"I’m writing as a way to work against our separateness, by demonstrating the effects of that separateness. I believe the lyric poem can take you to languagelessness—that, ideally, is where it would leave you—and that we can be unified in or even by that 'silence.' The paradox of the lyric poem is that the medium is language or breath, but it takes you to a place that we can’t exactly language. I believe that in my bones."
via THE PARIS REVIEW |
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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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