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Poetry Friday: “First Kiss”

By Todd DavisNovember 2, 2018

Todd Davis’s poetic imagination is steeped in the natural world. “First Kiss” demonstrates this as much as any poem possibly could. The poem describes a childhood courtship, every action of which either involves elements of nature or is seen in terms of them. This begins with the poem’s very first words: the girl sounds like…

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Poetry Friday: “Walking on Water in Venice”

By Jean JanzenOctober 19, 2018

Anyone who’s visited a city far from daily familiars—surrounded by new language, customs, landscapes, and cuisine—knows how the senses seem on high alert, including our acknowledgment that we inhabit a physical body attempting to maneuver all of the above with grace and even confidence. Here, Jean Janzen’s speaker revisits a romanticized location known for its…

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Poetry Friday: “Lord, Sky”

By Betsy ShollOctober 12, 2018

The compelling narrative of “Lord, Sky,” set during the time of an election, is also sheer poetry. The writer repeats diction (“light,” “sky,” “moon,” “grin”) and layers language (“heaven,” “rainbow,” “stars,” “night,” “midnight”) to invite us “little trees of heaven / stuck in concrete” to pay heed to the world above and around us, to…

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Poetry Friday: “Bird on Knee”

By Tara BraySeptember 28, 2018

Like Emily Dickinson, Bray describes hope as thing with feathers, “an eastern phoebe.” Turning on sound and image, the poem “Bird on Knee” subtly shifts, inflecting new meaning. Each element nests in the other, layered, like a bird perched on a lap. Keening sounds repeat in “lightly,” “knee,” “eastern,” “phoebe,” and “me.” The density and…

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Poetry Friday: “The Ordinary Time”

By Dana Littlepage SmithSeptember 21, 2018

According to the Church’s liturgical calendar, this is the twenty-fourth week of Ordinary Time, the numbered weeks between the end of the Christmas season and the beginning of Lent, as well as the weeks following Pentecost Sunday until the first Sunday of Advent. Ordinary Time is the period in which the faithful live not in…

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Poetry Friday:
Your Face Has Always Been Peppered With Moles

By Cortney Lamar CharlestonAugust 31, 2018

Charleston’s poem is a piece of contrasts: youth and age, sugar and spice, consumption and generosity. Rife with gustatory description, the poem gathers crumbs of what it means to be home. Our speaker avoids establishing a setting directly. As we read, we discover location through a person and through food. “The pink lip of the…

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Poetry Friday: Raven

By Anya SilverAugust 17, 2018

Poet Anya Krugovoy Silver passed away on Monday, August 6, in Macon, Georgia, at forty-nine. Image was honored to print a number of her poems over the years, and we are all grieving this loss. In the words of her friend, the poet Tania Runyan: Anya didn’t want to be a hero or a fighter.…

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Poetry Friday: “The Egg of Anything”

By Paula BohinceJuly 20, 2018

In examining her simple subject, Bohince expands the scope of an egg. The poem’s title, “The Egg of Anything” lets the egg become the root and symbol of large and small images: “sun and moon mixed,” or “little o / in hope or love.” Bohince’s descriptions radiate through her abstract comparisons and playful word choices…

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Poetry Friday: “Some Small Bone”

By Hailey LeithauserJuly 13, 2018

One of a writer’s greatest challenges is to create a short piece that is in no other way “small.”  In 14 brief lines, Hailey Leithauser has succeeded in writing a poem that is simultaneously compact and expansive.   Prefacing it with Robert Bly’s line, “Some small bone in your foot is longing for heaven,” Leithauser’s…

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Poetry Friday: “Pray That the Creek Don’t Dry Up”

By Peggy RosenthalJuly 6, 2018

Here is a poem about making a poem. The first stanza, a single sentence, stretches out through cosmic imagery: “light sift[ing] down,” “erasable darkness seep[ing] up,” “the crack to the radiant world closing in on itself.” The diction here is high, poetic. Then suddenly the next stanza plunks us down to earth with “One way…

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