What Sparks Poetry:
Ariana Benson on "Dear Moses Grandy, ...Love, The Great Dismal Swamp"
The first time the land spoke to me through poetry, its message arrived in the form of a letter, not addressed to me, but from one lover to another. In “Dear Moses Grandy, …Love, the Great Dismal Swamp,” the murky, forested, ever-shrinking land of Southeastern Virginia (that was the backdrop of much of my childhood) writes to and commemorates her first lover: Moses Grandy, an enslaved man, who, in his single-person boat and with his rustic, handmade tools, carved canals out of the murk and morass that had scared many intrepid explorers away for good. |
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"A Review of Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles"
"Grief is the ultimate organizing principle here. Grief will have the final word. On the page, one might mistake the lines for gentler than they are, but read aloud, McSweeney’s poetics and aesthetics turn toward terrifying tongue twisters.thrumming with a rhythm that never quite settles down. Instead, her syntax pushes to the edge of meaning and beyond, off the cliff of it altogether, into a phantasmagoria of sound."
viaTHE RUMPUS |
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