Heart’s Companion: Listening to Leonard Cohen
By Essay Issue 79
Somebody said, “Lift that bale.” THE EPIGRAPH to Leonard Cohen’s second novel, Beautiful Losers, is attributed to “Ray Charles singing ‘Ol’ Man River.’” Not to Oscar Hammerstein, who wrote the lyrics, but to one of the song’s many singers. This was back when Cohen was known primarily as a novelist and poet, before he had performed…
Read MoreA Conversation with Julia Spicher Kasdorf
By Interview Issue 79
Julia Spicher Kasdorf is the author of three poetry collections—Sleeping Preacher (1992), Eve’s Striptease (1998), and Poetry in America (2011)—all from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Sleeping Preacher won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes College’s Association Award for New Writing, and Eve’s Striptease was named one of the top twenty poetry books of 1998 by Library Journal. She has…
Read MoreWeb Exclusive: A Conversation with Lauren F. Winner
By Interview Issue 84
Each chapter of Lauren F. Winner’s new book, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God (HarperOne), explores a single biblical image of God through a mix of exegesis, cultural history, and personal essay. The chapter excerpted in issue 84 is about bread. Image’s Mary Kenagy Mitchell recently asked Winner about her…
Read MoreTranslation Back Into Native Tongues
By Poetry Issue 81
Sometimes, I miss the Aramaic of youth. Then, the personal flame came over us and we spoke to the numb nations— until the nations winnowed and muted us, but not breaking the spirit of our speech. Now, I live in the breeze’s murmur, the native tongues to which the soul responds, a language that comforts…
Read MoreSyllable Nutshell
By Poetry Issue 83
G is for onset, kickoff, square one, raging beginning of in the beginning out of the starting gate, raw originality in original sense, and if consonantal sine qua non for vanity plates. O is for nucleus, sonorous meat in a syllable sandwich, bellybutton earful, always a vowel, animal imperative enough in itself to tell the…
Read MoreAnti-poetics
By Poetry Issue 83
When everything has left you, at the end, the world will come down to a few old words you will see new because you’ve chosen to. Your last breath will be like my first today. So I start here, in that extremity— or is it just simplicity I’ve earned by learning to be, the page…
Read MoreThe Holy Fool Meets Himself on One of His Highways
By Poetry Issue 83
Down the long road leading me back to me I saw my holy friends. I called hello. This is not allegory. Mind me well. I do not speak in tongues or prophecy. I talk in the plain speech of poetry, which is to say, the morning gives me stars, leftover nights from which to fabricate…
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