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  • Timothy Liu on Hafiz’s “Little Book of Life”

    Will the real Hafiz (Shams al-Din Mohammad Hafiz-e Shirazi, 1325-1390 CE), aka Hafez, please stand up?
    Plume Issue #155 July 2024

  • Daniel J. Ayoroa translated from Spanish by Frances Simán and Mihaela Moscaliuc  

    Daniel J. Ayoroa translated from Spanish by Frances Simán and Mihaela Moscaliuc   Ada Byron   It can be said…

  • Peter Campion’s “Unidentified Animal” | A Brief Portfolio and An Interview with Amanda Newell

    As the title suggests, the underlying energy of your remarkable new collection is a primal, restless one.
    Plume Issue #155 July 2024

  • Seven Slovene Poets introduced by Sydney Lea

    For reasons there’s no need to explore, I have had a long literary and personal attachment to Slovenia
    Special Feature

  • The Empty Bowl: Metaphor as Meaning by Michael Simms

    As English teachers, we know our job is to explain to students that a metaphor is a figure of speech in which an image stands for an idea.
    Plume Issue #155 July 2024

  • Two Poems translated from Spanish by Diana Conchado

    I have always liked bell towers

  • Three Poems and a Translation

    In life I was chasing a deer. In sleep the deer

  • Happiness on Earth

    Especially if you were waking

  • First Words

    In the marriage booth at sleep-away camp,

  • The Neighbor’s War and Walking Backwards

    Through my kitchen window I can watch

  • Three Poems

    I sat in the late day sun

  • For D, reading poems

    When I was a kid, only a flu could buy me

  • The Next Life and Windpowered

    Sea fog drifting through the pines—

  • A History of Mirrors

    We’ve accidentally collided with something real tonight

  • Lea, Ackerman, Stanton, et. al.

    Sydney Lea on Seven Slovene Poets Special Feature: I’ve had a long association with Slovenia by way of pure serendipity.…

    Plume Issue #155 July 2024

  • Delilah Miklave

    You think that you know baptism

  • A Brief Portfolio

    Our first time at the Sistine Chapel, prior to the restoration, the colors were dulled,

  • Mitchell | Nieves

    Our mutual friend, the late and beloved poet Lee Sharkey, urged me to contact John A. Nieves
    Plume Issue #154 June 2024

  • The Last Phonebooth

    The last phone booth on the planet smells

  • Vasantkumar, Laichas, Clark et. al.

    Chris Vasantkumar on “I Can’t Tell if the Light…”: Parts of it might read as surrealism but this poem is…

    Plume Issue #154 June 2024

  • Wind and Shadows: In Pursuit of a Grandfather’s Story: A Conversation with Tyler Mills by Frances Richey

    Wind and Shadows: In Pursuit of a Grandfather’s Story A Conversation with Tyler Mills by Frances Richey In early April,…

    Plume Issue #154 June 2024

  • A Brief Portfolio

    He’s nowhere now.

  • Guardian Angels Witness More Lives Than Yours

    You are eight years old.

  • Post Mortem

    You might not see the bodies in the famous photo

  • The Literary Fragment, Black Humor, and the Ampersand: Three Short Essays by Peter Johnson

    I want to talk about the “literary fragment.”
    Plume Issue #154 June 2024

  • Three prose poems by Marie Lundquist translated from Swedish by Malena Mörling

    Three prose poems by Marie Lundquist translated from Swedish by Malena Mörling   The nights when you practice tenderness, the…

  • Gott im Himmel and The Corner of Bellington Street and Sparta

    Gott was thicket, thorned, glottal,

  • Dan O’Brien’s ‘Survivor’s Notebook’ reviewed by Amanda Newell

    It would be easy enough to call Dan O’Brien’s latest collection, Survivor’s Notebook, a prose-poem sequence—it’s what the book calls itself.
    Plume Issue #154 June 2024

  • SHINE, NOT BURN

    Just at that point

  • Two Poems

    I could never say anything about my father

  • Repair

    In this, our chapter on enamelware

  • Chaja-Lea Returns

    This is where we were

  • Three Poems

    I gave my mother

  • I Can’t Tell If the Light Is Whispering “Loss” in My Ear or Imprinting Darkness on My Body

    At the last house,

  • A Brief Portfolio

    When the light goes out, and the book is set down

  • Checkerboard Mesa

    Dear mesa, dome of rock, do you remember your deep past?

  • Work from Leonor Scliar-Cabral, Rosa Alice Branco and Luís Miguel Nava translated by Alexis Levitin

    With arms uplifted towards the sky they pray,
    Translations Portfolio

  • Two Poems translated from the Persian by Sholeh Wolpé

    I’ve heard the volley of a thousand soldiers,

  • Culver, Berdeshevsky, Cader, et. al.

    Ralph Culver on “October, and the sun burnishes”:   More than anything else, “October, and the sun burnishes” is a…

    Plume Issue #153 May 2024

  • Villanelles and the Art of Anguish by Maggie Dietz

    J’ay perdu ma tourterelle; I lost my turtledove; I have lost my turtledove: Est-ce-point elle que j’oy? Is it not she that I hear? Isn’t that her gentle coo?  J
    Plume Issue #153 May 2024

  • Gott im Himmel and The Corner of Bellington Street and Sparta

    Gott was thicket, thorned, glottal,

  • Meandering, Ebbing and Flowing with Slow Water: Stephan Crump and Nancy Mitchell

        Meandering, Ebbing and Flowing with Slow Water Stephan Crump and Nancy Mitchell     Acclaimed composer and bassist…

    Special Feature

  • Penelope Pelizzon’s A Gaze Hound that Hunteth by the Eye reviewed by Jane Zwart

    Were I not smitten, ahead of time, with V. Penelope Pelizzon’s poems, I might have passed over her newest collection
    Plume Issue #153 May 2024

  • Three Poems translated from Argentinian Spanish by Lorena Wolfman

    Entering the house from the back without letting anyone know,

  • Kintsugi and We Did Not Murder One Another

    t will be spring  sometime, when the autumn dies, when the thaw melts.

  • Remnant Tongue

    I woke wounded

  • “October, and the sun burnishes”

    October, and the sun burnishes the leaves so brightly you

  • Three Poems

    Heat, filthy, gut-sick heat in my city’s cobblestone streets.

  • [There was the way his mother]

    There was the way his mother called him baby-faced that made me defensive.

  • Puritan Watc, Yonder and Birthday

    Longitude was the great mystery

  • In Waterplace Park on Our 15th Anniversary

    I’m waiting for you on the bank of the river,

  • How the West Was Won and Crack in the World

    Build a garage on the roof

  • The Last Photograph

    a golden shovel on the opening line of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “To Prisoners”

  • Almost and Caught Out

    Cows and sheep segregate themselves

  • The Other by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

    The poems in this feature look at how a certain distance or feeling of seeming “otherness” between the speaker and her/his/their subject creates a kind of unexpected intimacy, insight, understanding.
    Plume Issue #153 May 2024

  • Lummis | Laichas

    I was part way into one of Tom Laichas’ three published collections when I began to marvel at the skill, the sure-footed, far-ranging variety
    Station to Station

  • The Insurgency of Tears is to Eradicate Sadness and Hold Joy as Close as the Moon

    Mike’s at The Whitney.

  • Picking Prunes and The Majestic Theatre

    From the ground up is how you rise   

  • Voisine, Bassiri, Woloch, et. al.

    Connie Voisine on Translating Patron Henekou: Patron Henekou’s Jazz et autres prières (Jazz and Other Prayers) engages with the late 20th and early…

    Plume Issue # 152 April 2024

  • James Crews: The Poetry of Connection and Joy, A conversation with Michael Simms

    James, you've been tremendously prolific in recent years.
    Plume Issue # 152 April 2024

  • Bystander Effect, Permanence and Weapon

    Your weapon is an eraser.

  • The City translated by Kaveh Bassiri

    I dream the city is flying in an airplane

  • A Brief Portfolio

    the afternoons are perfect

  • A Series of Small Scandals and Dear Telephone Booth,

    Imogen photographed her new husband:

  • Drinking, Failure and Erotics

    Easing from fixed to felt, mellow waves of breeze, the lean

  • Two Poems translated by Connie Voisine

    Words here carry the scent of snow,

  • Practicing Eights

    After I almost died, it was hard

  • Oloid and Pareidolia

    Saturday, awake to the raw April outside. A dream that was on my tongue is gone with a swallow.

  • Train to Naples and “It’s Awful Plain”

    Five ceramic half-ducks flew up the wall.

  • Jug

    Colors, we go way back.

  • Two O’Clock and Stray

    As though all at once it is afternoon

  • “The End” an essay by Heather McHugh

    I'm drawn to seacoasts, where you see so many ways at once.
    Plume Issue # 152 April 2024

  • Rilke 5 Translations

    Almost like on the last day when the dead tear

  • Honey

    Strange music of our Emily —

  • Timothy Liu Ruminates on Timmy Straw’s ‘The Thomas Salto’ in Five Short Lyrics

    This blockbuster debut is so far
    Plume Issue # 152 April 2024

  • Uncovering What Is Brave: A Remembrance of Brigit Pegeen Kelly by Joy Manesiotis and Maxine Scates

    Brigit Pegeen Kelly lived her life day to day, like most of us do.
    Plume Issue #151 March 2024

  • Writing Internationally: Ian Haight in conversation with Tzveta Sofronieva

    Tzveta Sofronieva is the author of over twenty books, including Multiverse (2020), a collection of new and selected poems written originally in German, Bulgarian, and English.
    Plume Issue #151 March 2024

  • Freeman, Sholl, Aizenberg, et. al.

    Jan Freeman on “Eating the Madeleine”: This poem began percolating when I was walking by a walled-in garden in the…

    Plume Issue #151 March 2024

  • Sarabande’s Another Last Call: poems on addiction and deliverance reviewed by Celeste Lipkes

    One of the most useful things I did during my psychiatry training was attend an open AA meeting.
    Plume Issue #151 March 2024

  • Three Poems

    I dropped a sprig of laurel into your grave

  • Grandpa David Told Me Once of Carpathia, a Place He had Never Been

    His hospital topped

  • Wind, Blue Sky

    I am practicing being

  • Four Poems

    I don’t like it

  • A Brief Portfolio

    “What is truth?” Pilate asked.  Before Jesus could answer Pilate was on his way out the door.

  • Pierantonio on Being Married to Artemisia Gentileschi the Night She Dances the Ballet: War of Beauty War of Love, 1612

    You broke through a bouquet

  • Eating the Madeleine

    I remember the scut of it:

  • The Minefield and Uncanny Daddy

    In the hospital after so strangely

  • Hotline

    The calls came in around the clock. A nunnery in Nova Scotia with a broken clavichord.

  • Piano Epistemology, Apostrophes and Beauty

    I’m pretty sure this piano exists,

  • Dear— and On Misreading a Line by Mario de Andrade

    Scorch splinter shard and itch  Dear glitch

  • Venn Diagrams

    Venn Diagrams   X-rays, muons, ultraviolet radiation— X-rays can diagnose fractures in the skull; muons can map spaces inside the…

  • Smith, Purpura, Zwart, et. al.

    Ron Smith: a prose piece on his poem “August 3rd”:  Stroke The August 3rd events in my poem happened many,…

    Plume Issue #150 February 2024

  • Dispatches From Lviv, A Conversation With Halyna Kruk, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Ali Kinsella, and Chard deNiord

    Dzvinia and Ali, your upcoming collaborative book, Lost in Living, featuring translations of Halyna Kruk’s poetry, and for which you've just been granted a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, is set for release in spring 2024 through Lost Horse Press.
    Plume Issue #150 February 2024

  • Rae Armantrout’s “Notice” reviewed by James Sherry

    I notice that most writing called ecopoetry turns out to be little other than pastoral description of the kind that has been around for 2000+ years.
    Plume Issue #150 February 2024

  • Sexy Beast: The Song of Solomon by Barbara Hamby

    Barbara Hamby combines exemplary exegetical skills with colorful commentary in her analysis of the biblical poem, The Song of Songs in her essay  titled “Sexy Beast, The Song of Solomon.”
    Plume Issue #150 February 2024

  • The Reckoning and 3AM

    Shadows stretch across the pine floor

  • Two Poems translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa

    I told myself, why not

  • August 3rd

    After twenty horrific minutes, I think she

  • A Brief Portfolio

    Not built to just do it

  • First Communion, forty-two and the unnamed

    I shall sit here, on this bench,

  • Unrest or What the French Horn Can Teach You

    To master the French Horn, you need lips of steel

  • Ode to Hands translated from Spanish by Mihaela Moscaliuc and Juan Suárez Proaño

    Nothing can hide from hands

  • Hymn of the Squirrels, Echidna Tremens and Singled Out

    Not an issue of ‘variety’, of red, brown, grey and black,

  • The Angels’ Share and Poem Without a Title

    Over distilleries’ rooftops, angels tipple

  • Streak, Exit Survey and Against All Endings

    A jackknifed semi full

  • from Sleeping with Bashō

    Growing out of clouds like a cedar tree—

  • Dear Lucinda Williams and Dear Jules

    A power in proximity to terror, the lower middle-class sublime of a car’s back seat,

  • The All-Overs, This is Where God Stays When He’s in Town and Mr. Jackson’s Killer

    I like words like gallimaufry, tawdry, billingsgate—braggadocio! Rodomontade.

  • “unalone” with Jessica Jacobs: A conversation with Nancy Mitchell

    Thank you, Jessica, for talking with us about "unalone", forthcoming from Four Way Books in March 2024...
    Issue #149 January 2024

  • Ulku, Buckley, Warren, et. al.

    Alpay Ulku Regarding “On Reading with an Open Heart”: Since my piece in this issue is non-fiction, I felt like…

    Issue #149 January 2024

  • Three Poems

    I’ve seen demons, each one tossed

  • Richey | Johnson

    It surprises me, how alone they are
    Station to Station

  • Two Poems

    I didn't know it then, but we were learning Italian...

  • Review of Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali by Jane Zwart

    All of us who read poetry, I suspect, have stanzas to which we return for reassurance
    Issue #149 January 2024

  • On Whales and Whales/ Baleas e Baleas by Luisa Castro, translated from Galician by Keith Payne

    First published to immediate and critical acclaim in 1988, Luisa Castro’s Baleas e Baleas is considered one of the most pivotal collections in contemporary Galician poetry
    Translations Portfolio

  • On Reading with an a Open Heart by Alpay Ulku

    The Cold War was very much a presence and so was the Second World War.
    Issue #149 January 2024

  • A Brief Portfolio

    A detail like a grave

  • Uplight

    The uplight is where I want to be, above and looking, and looking over.

  • Insomnia, A Love Story

    Everybody sleeps.  Our poem starts with that premise.

  • Separation

    Slumbering suburbs, calm depths of summer.

  • Two Poems

    You search for the best doctors, try to curb her pain—

  • In God’s Intestine and Goner

    The husband, who has accepted Buddhist precepts,

  • At Arlington and Boys

    After the gunfire, the tact of “Taps.”

  • Heat Lightning

    Before the fireflies and whiskey

  • Graham Foust’s “Terminations” reviewed by Timothy Liu

    I once heard a literary critic say: “Fifty years from now, John Ashbery will more or less sound like Mary Oliver.
    Book Review

  • Camp, Pedone, Pindyck, et. al.

    Lauren Camp on “Honest Orbit”: The poem came out of time I spent as Poet-in-Residence at Lowell Observatory, talking to…

    Issue #148 December 2023

  • Maybe It Will Happen in the Span of a Sentence translated by Daniel Bourne

    One of the most interesting poets to emerge in Poland during the final decades of the 20th century

  • deNiord | Hall

    Clay dogs on the mantle. Bear
    Station to Station

  • “The Velvet Livingness” a conversation with Megan Fernandes by Frances Richey

    “The Velvet Livingness” a conversation with Megan Fernandes by Frances Richey     On a beautiful afternoon in August, 2023,…

    Issue #148 December 2023

  • Why I Write; An essay by Dorianne Laux

    I am still hard at work on this project of the self.
    Issue #148 December 2023

  • The Dragonfly

    Diamond-crusted wings flying an armored syringe

  • The First Communion and Forty-Two

    I shall sit here, on this bench,

  • Honest Orbit

    For weeks I sift in vast exits

  • Risk Factor

    After the reading, a young Jewish woman

  • Mother, at Last

    You were Scarlett O’Hara

  • A Brief Portfolio

    I was in sixth grade when I twirled Stephanie Comb’s

  • Morning Bells in Marienplatz

    The wasps

  • This Close and Gaza Aftermath

    Little brother I have forgotten

  • Ultimatum

    If I forget one character a day

  • Pentimento

    Meet me by the shadows & ponds of light where

  • Hi. My Name Is Billy Hollands.

    And there it is, that little tilt of my head –

  • Fifteen Essays on Boats, Boats, Language, and the SS

    The Palermo Airport is not large.

  • The Poem as Lightvessel: A Dialogue on Poetry and Community with Kelli Russell Agodon by Amanda Newell

    You are such an accomplished poet, and I have so much I want to talk to you about, but first...
    Issue #147 November 2023

  • From AfterTalk

    Dumuzi spoke: “My sister, I would go with you to my garden

  • Portrait of My Father as a Snake

    I was dead. The hospital around me

  • Little Poems, ed. Michael Hennessy Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series, reviewed by Amit Majmudar

    All anthologies are arbitrary, but some are more arbitrary than others.
    Book Review

  • Girl Talk: How a Sumerian Princess Jumpstarted Poetry by Barbara Hamby

    When I was a girl, I’d fantasize about the lives of biblical women—Queen Esther, Ruth, Jezebel, Bathsheba, the Queen of Sheba, Mary Magdalene.
    Issue #147 November 2023

  • Keith Flynn | Frank Paino

    A swan only sings one time.
    Station to Station

  • Same Screen

    Every summer the students at the Bread Loaf School of English

  • Blueprint and Ancient Story

    The poem I want to build needs a vestibule

  • A Brief Portfolio

    have heard through some trembling of their web

  • Two Poems

    Where does it live?

  • November

    Hours ago I was walking with my dog down

  • The Consultation Business

    If I consult the Philosopher’s Tarot to guide my thought

  • Mourning and Melancholia

    If I had two dogs,

  • The Color I Take

    All day the green had soaked me

  • Ambition and House I Didn’t Mean to Build

    In excess always, gorged

  • Shaughnessy, Scates, Donnelly, et. al.

    Lorna Shaughnessy on translating Rafael Alberti: I have been reading Alberti’s poetry since I was an undergraduate, and included it…

    Issue #147 November 2023

  • Two poems by Rafael Alberti translated from Spanish by Lorna Shaughnessy

    Already, a year asleep, some one not waiting

  • Rhythm Benders: The Musicality of American Poetry by Michael Simms

    A poem is rooted in the rhythms of pulse, breath and movement.
    Issue #146 October 2023

  • On Frank Stanford by Timothy Liu

    They say you die three times.
    Book Review

  • Delbos, Johnson, Raab, et. al.

    Stephan Delbos on Translating the Poetry of Tim Postovit Tim Postovit is one of the most excitingly imaginative and worldly…

    Editors Note

  • Beeder | Rivera

    How like a hive, his body−so busy with rigor,
    Station to Station

  • Peter Johnson, Excerpts from Observations from the Edge of the Abyss

    In 1999, the eccentric Knott sent me thoughtfully inscribed cheap, staple-bound pamphlets of his poems, sometimes quoting from my own prose poems in the inscriptions.
    Special Feature

  • About Tea translated from Czech by Stephan Delbos

    before we set out let’s promise each other

  • Passing Royalty and Dostadning: Beginner’s Translation

    I’m sorry I didn’t comprehend sooner how threatening

  • Ana Varela Tafur translated from Spanish by Yaccaira Salvatierra

    By the banks or the center of a river,

  • A Demitasse of Extinction

    So funny how that uncanny, unfunny man sought you out on a rainy day in Istanbul—you were in earshot of the bazaar and smoking a hookah, and, of course, it was Ramadan.

  • The Invention of Everyday Life

    A few days later Pierre arrived.

  • Light and Dark

    I like that the word light is powerful and yet so gentle, like a good man.

  • The Afterlife of Fish and Opossum

    Whenever we caught fish when we were boys,

  • Rondeau and Song

    She would have yawned to see a Pharaoh’s fall,

  • 5 under 35 curated by John A. Nieves

    2023 5 under 35 Feature for Plume Poetry Curated by John A. Nieves     JAN: Since our last 5…

    Featured Selection

  • Nautilus

    I fantasize about inhabiting a nautilus, how each chamber

  • The Wind Cried Mary  

    In 1967 when Hendrix coaxed, Are you experienced?

  • How I Felt the First Time I Tried It

    Like a clam’s tongue muscling

  • Our Bodies Ourselves

    No one would sit by Vicky Syme

  • DERRIÈRE LE MUR ANTI-BRUIT/PROMENADES EN ÎLE-DE-FRANCE by Chantal Bizzini translated by J. Bradford Anderson

    Pourquoi le rez-de-chaussée

  • Emanuel’s Elegies: “Something about art/ And its opportunities” by Deborah Bogen

    Emanuel’s Elegies: “Something about art/ And its opportunities” Lynn Emanuel is the author of three books of poems, none of…

    Issue #145 September 2023

  • Nicole Sealey on The Ferguson Report: An Erasure: An interview with  Sally Bliumis-Dunn

    I am so excited to delve into The Ferguson Report : An Erasure.
    Featured Selection

  • Kallet | Harper

    When my friends lost their baby, I
    Station to Station

  • Groom, Simms, Kellogg, et. al.

    Kelle Groom on “TURN IT UP” and “MORE NIGHTS THAN DAYS”: “TURN IT UP”  I wrote this poem after reading…

    Editors Note

  • Jared Beloff’s “Who Will Cradle Your Head” reviewed by Linda Mills Woolsey

    In A Sand County Almanac (1949), Aldo Leopold writes: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
    Book Review

  • A Brief Portfolio

    “Digital streaming, brother, rates of flow in time

  • Car le Vice by Tomaž Šalamun translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry

    Car le Vice, rongeant ma native noblesse

  • You Don’t Travel Light, Life

    is a cumbersome business.

  • The World As Sound

    I didn’t speak until I was five

  • More Nights Than Days and Turn It Up

    At the end of my street, they cut the trees.

  • Head of a Woman with the Horns of a Ram

    I used to curse the sidewalk ice

  • Little Black Dress and Julia

    Puddled at my feet or ruched

  • Storm Song, Monarch, Sultry Night and Galveston, 1900

    Last night heat

  • Two Poems by George Seferis, translated from modern Greek by Jennifer R. Kellogg

    George Seferis, Two Poems,  translated from modern Greek by Jennifer R. Kellogg     Holy Saturday   Tomorrow, the brilliant…

  • LIGHT OF THE MOON, PATRIMONY, AN UNWANTED LIGHT

    We listened as a pair of owls rousted

  • A Brief Portfolio of Selected Poems by Yves Bonnefoy translated by Hoyt Rogers

    I admire the definition of poetry in Beasts, Men, and Gods, the inexhaustible book by Ossendowski.

  • Remedios: Tommy Archuleta in Conversation with Amy Beeder (and five poems)

    Remedios:  Tommy Archuleta in Conversation with Amy Beeder (and five poems)       Remedio: Añil del Muerto   To…

    Featured Selection

  • Hoppenthaler, Bond and Upton, et. al.

    John Hoppenthaler on “Nocturne”: My poems typically begin as riffs inspired by whatever landscape the world provides at a given…

    Editors Note

  • Timothy Liu reviews Ana Božičević’s “New Life”

    I was strolling through Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan and happened upon a reading at the outdoor Reading Room.
    Book Review

  • Therapon, III, 5 

    …you whose waters never breathe   whose

  • Conjuring the Last Gleeman by Steve Kuusisto

    There's a curious essay by Yeats called "The Last Gleeman" wherein he details the life of a Dublin street poet named Michael Moran.
    Essays and Comment

  • A Brief Portfolio: Heaney in an Irish Pub & Other Poems

    Heaney in an Irish Pub, Washington, DC, Hunger, In the Bishop's Garden:  Hide and Seek and Lost in China

  • Logan | Steidle

    The brief, impersonal, conversations they had together were creating that peculiar intimacy which consists in shyness.
    Station to Station

  • From Records of Explosion: Poems by Nianxi Chen, translated from Chinese by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor and Kuo Zhang, with an interview by Mihaela Moscaliuc

    You are the first ones to bring/recreate Nianxi Chen’s work into/in English.
    Translations Portfolio

  • ALERT

    My phone sends me an alert:

  • Two Departures from Rilke

    Terrified past panic, strict lines collapsed,

  • The Cormorant

    They slip the string

  • Nocturne

    Last night a barred owl swept across the road,

  • It Will Start One Day

    you know, it will start one day, the ebb

  • ORCA and PISMIRE

    White Gladis, Gladis Clara, Gladis Filabres, Gladyi Tarij,

  • Undertaking

    “It is certainly strange

  • The New Odyssey Concordance

    This is not the Odyssey

  • A Different Origin

    When the snake in Eden approached Eve

  • Fox and Piñata

    I saw my first movie

  • Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, a short film by Frank Heath with music by Cory Smythe

    Soundtracked by "Combustion 2" from the Cory Smythe album Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

  • Buckley | Hodges

    I’m grateful for the opportunity to praise and draw some attention to the poetry of Catherine Abbey Hodges.
    Station to Station

  • Bradbury, Bliumis-Dunn, Florczyk, et. al.

    Steve Bradbury on translating Wu Yu Hsuan: I took this “headshot” of Frida, as she likes to call herself in English…

    Editors Note

  • On Brueghel’s Massacre of the Innocents

    He’s switched the scene from Bethlehem

  • Such Silence by Troy Jollimore

    The concluding couplet of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” has tended to dominate our consciousness of that poem; so much so that we tend to lose sight of the complex context in which those famous pronouncements are embedded.
    Featured Selection

  • Syntax by Jessica Goodfellow

    I teach writing to international graduate students, who regularly charm me with their wildly inventive word order.
    Essays and Comment

  • Celeste Lipkes’ “Radium Girl” reviewed by Jane Zwart

      review of Radium Girl by Celeste Lipkes. University of Wisconsin Press, 2023. Diane Seuss, in her essay “Restless Herd,”…

    Book Review

  • Two Poems translated from Chinese by Steve Bradbury

    The still object Kazuo Ohno caressed is already growing old

  • Fish Belly Poem and a poem by Wang Yuyang translated by Arthur Sze

    Dr. Xia Kejun said today:

  • Three Poems

    I was four or five, bored by the dull terrain

  • Rue Delambre

    As soon as the plane takes off the city

  • Two Poems

    There was intent. To bisect the fields

  • ARS Poetica Chemistrica & Hitting the Bullseye of Depression

    alchemy: a medieval chemical science and speculative philosophy aiming to achieve the transmutation of the base metals into gold

  • Fake Lemon Tree on a November Day in a Boat Depot in Chelsea

    O lemon tree, how you emerge, distinct from everything

  • The Madonna Poems

    She bends to lift him from the basket.

  • Three poems translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk

    At night we stood together on guard,

  • Queen of the Lot

    When was the last time I watched The Letter

  • Coffee on the Stoop

    In the yard across the way, the neighbor’s cat—

  • Cardinal

    The drill of its song    the whoop whoop whoop

  • A Brief Portfolio

    As if overnight, the flowering pear tree

  • Yellowphant and Don’t Forget

    The circus so yellow and red stands on two feet,

  • Pinsky|Green

    Vocal   Infinite information here in my phone. Here in my head a congregation of dead With numbers I had…

    Station to Station

  • From “Underworlds”

    Hell of an exit,

  • Strangers at the Door: Robert Gibb, Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Jose Padua by Michael Simms

    I’ve always loved poetry that has a clear voice, a strong reliance on craft
    Essays and Comment

  • Adam Scheffler’s “Heartworm” reviewed by DeWitt Henry

    Adam Scheffler’s HEARTWORM: POEMS is a brilliant, laconic, and intensely alert second collection of 40 poems
    Book Review

  • Nathan McClain on “Previously Owned”: An interview with Sally Bliumis-Dunn

    It is a real treat and honor, not only to have been published in Plume Anthology 10, but also to be in this sustained conversation with you, which has been very lovely.
    Featured Selection

  • A Brief Portfolio

    Theatre people who know suppose them to bring good luck.

  • Lunette 15

    I came into the world through a wound

  • Three Poems

    Our lives are so brief, she says,

  • Bond, Karapetkova, Hadas, et. al.

    Bruce Bond on “Lunette 15”: This poem is part of a book-length cycle of poems composed in dialogue with photographs…

    Editors Note

  • “Bird or Old Man” translated from Bulgarian by Holly Karapetkova 

    He arrived with a bag full of fog.

  • From “The Last Letter of My Body”, translated from Russian by Anne O. Fisher

    it’s winter here: the winter rains come, the roses bloom

  • Lost Tails, City of Money and Counting the Money

    One day our tails fell off and lay at our feet like giant dead caterpillars.

  • Canary Island Date Palm, Love & Ink and Persephone

    Couldn’t say the dream I had last night.

  • A Thin Membrane and For the New Parent

    I knew she had a glass eye though she never spoke of it

  • Moving the Piano and From the Cliff

    Compact and gleaming, black and white,

  • Three Poems

    My fingers grow white with winter, blood

  • Comet

    You once filled my night sky.

  • Poems from Mariella Nigro’s Memory Rewritten and interview by Mihaela Moscaliuc with translators Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas

    Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas in conversation with Mihaela Moscaliuc   Mihaela Moscaliuc: I am excited we are…

    Featured Selection

  • Goodfellow, Ulku, Tymchuk, et. al.

    Jessica Goodfellow on ‘On My Diagnosis of Pulsatile Tinnitus.’ : We had just moved into a new house when the…

    Editors Note

  • The Poetic “Engine” in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction by Chard deNiord

    After reading and teaching Flannery O'Connor’s stories for decades, along with having grown up myself in the South in a town not that dissimilar from O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia, I developed a deep appreciation for both the creative and theological genius in O’Connor’s fiction, particularly her incisive use of irony and paradox in rural, unsophisticated settings.
    Essays and Comment

  • John Moessner’s Harmonia reviewed by Peter Vertacnik

    John Moessner’s debut collection of poems published this month by Stephen F. Austin State University Press, is a book suffused with death and grieving.
    Book Review

  • Poems from Ukraine translated by Dzvinia Orlowsky and Chard deNiord

    If it was a wedding instead of war,

  • Three Poems

    All things counter, original, spare strange

  • Happy Hour & Babies Cry at 5:03 pm

    Marcy lets us play

  • Spoiler Alert

    This all started when Tanya, that wreck of a billionaire

  • On My Diagnosis of Pulsatile Tinnitus

    Ever since I started hearing my heart

  • WINDOWS (after Baudelaire)

    You never see as much in an open window as you will looking at it when it’s closed. 

  • Her Stairs

    Yesterday upon the stair

  • The Last Time I Saw My Mother Before the Pandemic, #Me Too & Ready

    was on Valentine’s Day 2020. The residents who were able to sit up

  • Dead Tree in the Back Yard & Gait

    You aren’t mine. A lot line

  • Field Dressing

    Dispatch animal

  • American Upanishad (IV)

    The I is a pillar,

  • Triangulated

    Is it the ship that's moving or the sea that's moving, the tide flowing against the ship?

  • “Flüchtige monde” / “fugitive moons” translated from the German by Joscha Klueppel

    mountains recall their flock of birds. the dear birds,

  • In Case the Messiah Comes

    In Case the Messiah Comes   Split screen city. East doesn’t go West and West doesn’t go East. Occupied neighborhoods,…

  • The Voice of the Dragon: A Conversation with Katy Didden by Frances Richey

    Katy Didden’s new collection, Ore Choir, is a book to savor on many levels.
    Featured Selection

  • Harmon, Fagan, Buckley, et. al.

    Bradley Harmon on translating 2 Poems by Katarina Frostenson: A poem, like many poems, that upon and after reading infuses…

    Editors Note

  • Voicegrass and Incantation…translated from the Swedish by Bradley Harmon

    the word the night bore

  • Cassandra Atherton, “The Life and Times of Big Mr. Prose Poem”: While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems by Peter Johnson

    Self-confessed “wise guy of the prose poem” and also its unofficial laureate, Peter Johnson is one of America’s foremost practitioners and critics of prose poetry.
    Essays and Comment

  • Reading Heidegger Brings a Wild Joy

    My discovery of your essential thingness

  • Oj Golube, Moj Golube

    I was born to pigeons cooing.

  • Steer’s Head Triptych

    the cowboy cut, the wrangler,

  • Perspective and Day Sex Ode

    I have often confused the expression center of gravity, first

  • Aqua and Violet

    Childlike ones don’t tattle on the choice of stepfathers.

  • Elevator Boy

    All night I lifted them through seven stories

  • Four Poems translated by Christopher Buckley

    In the early morning the city is something else.

  • Milkweed Lullaby and Radio Lullaby

    The days were endless,

  • First Days at the Conservancy

    I’m looking out the window—Paula’s window—

  • “This We in the Back of the House” by Jacob Sunderlin reviewed by Jimmie Cumbie

    Let’s make praise: Jacob Sunderlin’s debut, This We In The Back Of The House, is an often bruising and intrepid collection of Indiana-based poems
    Book Review

  • Regret

    Later in life, we enter the neighborhood

  • A Window Into That In-Between Place That Has No Name: A Conversation with Elaine Sexton by Frances Richey

    There is much to admire in Elaine Sexton’s new collection
    Featured Selection

  • Azo Vauguy, translated by Todd Fredson, with a discussion by Todd Fredson, Honora Ankong, and Carmen Giménez Smith

    The poems discussed and presented below are authored by Azo Vauguy. Vauguy is a Bété poet. The Bété are an ethnic group within the West African country of Côte d’Ivoire.
    Translations Portfolio

  • Collins, Orlowsky, Bouwsma, et. al.

    Billy Collins on “Eyes on the Prize”: I cannot help recognize this poem as yet another example of my habit…

    Editors Note

  • Back in the U.S.S.R

    We weren’t the Beach Boys’ California girls,

  • banana [   ] by Paul Hlava Ceballos reviewed by Jane Zwart

    Indeed, a person is standing between them: an almost anonymous character, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, cloaked in a blue tarp that covers their face.
    Book Review

  • Once I loved an opera singer from Spain

    for 15 days, maybe 20.

  • Approximations

    Waking up in a borrowed room, in a body

  • Elegy for My Grandmother in the Form of a Cactus

    The way each linked lobe of your cactus swallows all

  • In the Next Life and The Office of Apology

    When I become the most trusted translator of your poems

  • January and The Marrow

    Greetings from the first darkness,

  • Thalia

    I died with them while they were alive.

  • Three Poems

    Every time I try to walk

  • If He Had Missed It Would Have Killed Him

    my uncle said of the dog pa shot

  • Still Life with Clouds and Eyes on the Prize

    Many white ones

  • Downsizing

    Hey, maybe the time has come to empty

  • Two Essays on Charles Simic by Donovan McAbee and Chard deNiord

    Two Essays on Charles Simic by Donovan McAbee and Chard deNiord   Charles Simic: An Appreciation from Donovan McAbee  …

    Essays and Comment

  • Poem by Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917-1945) translated from Polish by Alex Braslavsky

    There’s now a so-so year for you: 1933—

  • Jody Stewart’s ‘This Momentary World’ reviewed by Timothy Liu

                                Jody Stewart This Momentary World Nine…

    Book Review

  • While Another Dove Nude into the Breakers

    One talked with a talisman

  • Sea Otters, Missiles, Sardines

    Sea otters sun themselves on harbor rocks,

  • Received Wisdom

    A horse fence

  • On Brueghel’s the Tower of Bable

    Anybody calling this scheme stupid

  • At the Grave of Robert Lowell

    Cruising Currier & Ives’ staid byway,

  • And This is How It Happens

    Because I have been happily

  • Dream Vision of Theodore Roethke

    door to heaven? portal of wheres in a modern mound.

  • Blown Away

    There’s something stuck in my throat, it might be the red-eyed

  • The Occult Power of bon mots, mots justes; Quantum Hopping with Angie Estes from Nancy Mitchell

    It’s this contemplation and attention which animates the occult power of language to conjure and fuse the past, and present and future...
    Featured Selection

  • Making, Spinning, Weaving Texts by Alfred Corn

    In Anglo-Saxon, the word for poet was “scop” (pronounced “shop”), which is related to the verb “scieppan,” “to shape.”
    Essays and Comment

  • Cardona, Bassen, Filkins, et. al.

    Hélène Cardona on translating Maram Al-Masri’s poems: The Abduction refers to an autobiographical event in Al-Masri’s life. When, as a…

    Editors Note

  • Three poems from The Abduction by Maram Al-Masri, translated from French by Hélène Cardona

    I hugged him

  • Spell

    Unlikely find in a thrift store’s back bin:

  • Anthem and Under the Sun

    Through the backyard of a shuttered home

  • Madame Bovary, c’est moi

    If we were all as kind to each other

  • Elisa Biagini and Gregory Conti, curated by Mihaela Moscaliuc

    Translation Portfolio: Elisa Biagini and Gregory Conti, curated by Mihaela Moscaliuc   Elisa Biagini and Gregory Conti in conversation with…

    Translations Portfolio

  • Culhane, basta, Cisewski, et. al.

    Brian Culhane on “On Not Translating Polish Poets”: I once read that Ashbery would ask his students to translate a…

    Editors Note

  • Clarifying the Disorder of Catastrophe: In Conversation with Poet/Playwright Dan O’Brien by Amanda Newell

    My interview with poet and playwright Dan O'Brien took place over several months.
    Featured Selection

  • Photographer’s Song & Nothing Song

    Standing in the shade,

  • The Road Goes On Forever and The Party Never Ends by David Kirby

    As both an eminent, award-winning American poet and music critic, David Kirby has published more than two dozen volumes of…

    Essays and Comment

  • Say Them With Me: Disruptive Lyricism in Jos Charles’ a Year & other poems reviewed by Cassandra Whitaker

    Jos Charles’ third collection, a Year & other poems
    Book Review

  • On Not Translating Polish Poets

    Were it not

  • The Classics

    At 10, I studied Vera Ellen’s legs

  • Joy

    After you say my beauty

  • Hyphen

    Blue-black on my inked page,

  • Agnus Dei, Winslow Wants a Gun, Omega Street

    The shearer’s come horse-back from Solo –

  • California King, Head of the Meadow and A Miracle of Saint Anthony

    The little bright red car

  • Washing Women, Cathedral and Sky

    And when deep into the afternoon,

  • take heed, hazard

    what could it have been

  • Unbeckoning Glass and Time Faking Surprises

    This color is exhaled smoke from a bummed cigarette, a stray cloud for the sky.

  • Donovan, Freeman, Lindsay, et. al.

    Gregory Donovan on “The Jeweled Eye”: I despair of being able to write adequately about someone I love. One day…

    Editors Note

  • Translation Portfolio: Claudia Prado and Rebecca Gayle Howell curated by Mihaela Moscaliuc

    Translation Portfolio: Claudia Prado and Rebecca Gayle Howell   On El interior de la ballena, by Claudia Prado   Claudia…

    Translations Portfolio

  • Humor and Grace in The Survival Expo by Caki Wilkinson reviewed by Barbara Murphy

    We know we are in for a wild ride just looking at the cover of Caki Wilkinson’s daring third book
    Book Review

  • Doug Bytes: An unconventional essay by Doug Anderson

    Doug Anderson’s essay for this month’s issue of Plume consists of twenty four paragraphs that appeared first as posts on…

    Essays and Comment

  • Moral Issues in Poetry: David Baker, Ellen Bass, Joshua Bennett, Jenny George, John Murillo, Catherine Pierce collected by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

    Moral Issues in Poetry: David Baker, Ellen Bass, Joshua Bennett, Jenny George, John Murillo, Catherine Pierce   I am often…

    Featured Selection

  • Last Christmas

    Your best friend had brain cancer

  • Centers of Gold, Aphrodisiacal & What We Do Lives On

    The point, after all, with canvas, brush, and paint,

  • Ancestral Home

    Frangipani, its petals warm milk around

  • Silent Night & Pleasure

    If you dare to let yourself out

  • Volumes

    Certain mornings you can catch the sound

  • The Walk-Through Heart & The Odyssey of Yes

    my mother lived in a handmade cage

  • Old, Two, Not, Wrote

    letters to an old poet

  • The Jeweled Eye

    A ruby eye on the clasp of the gold

  • I Watch My Neighbor Watch Porn Movies through The Kitchen Window & Moonflaw

    while I wash the dishes, the back of his head propped

  • Cling of the World

    What could it mean

  • Two poems by Sandra Moussempès, translated from French by Carrie Chappell and Amanda Murphy

    A house stands out from the rest of the forest, emptied of its occupants for centuries

  • THE SOUND BOAT by Judith Vollmer reviewed by Linda Johnston Muhlhausen

    What’s the poor reviewer to do, faced with trying to do justice to a volume of poetry as gastronomically and symphonically generous as Judith Vollmer’s The Sound Boat?
    Book Review

  • In conversation with the world: Three poems & an interview with Vivek Narayanan, by Leeya Mehta

    In conversation with the world Three poems & an interview with Vivek Narayanan, by Leeya Mehta     “My theory…

    Featured Selection

  • ROOM AT THE TABLE by Charles Coe

    A Sunday afternoon in fall, after a big lunch, sitting with my father watching football, our favorite way of spending time together.
    Essays and Comment

  • Chappell & Murphy, Bakken, Moss, et. al.

    Carrie Chappell and Amanda Murphy on translating Sandra Moussempès: The feminist and multi-voiced dimensions of Sandra Moussempès’ work inspired us…

    Editors Note

  • Sign Language I & II translated by Kareem Abu-Zeid

    It’s not that I

  • The Afterlife of Breath

    My father dead on the gurney

  • Musée des Beaux Arts 

    Look at the science, already. 

  • Imperial Crimson

    There is no way I can write ‘producing meanings’ as my job in the CV,

  • Rizal Stadium, World War II

    He was almost home, poor guy.

  • Yet Another Life

    And then one day I was no longer up

  • Trudy Cooks Fish and The General

    The fish seemed fresh that night, as if they’d been caught off the coast near Zanzibar

  • A Hole in My Backyard

    I get very nervous, I admit.

  • Coattails

    When I was eighteen, I wanted to write a screenplay based on my father’s life: from his birth in poverty, how his family gathered around one scant meal a day of potatoes and onions

  • Quickies in Widowhood with three instances of laughter (one not narrated), two instances of crying

    Amid the whiteness of cheeses, corn puffs,

  • White Zinfandel

    Again last night I dreamed the dream called Waiter.

  • A Brief Portfolio

    I said goodbye to a friend who left a hole filled

  • Finding the Measure: Robert Kelly, Deep Image and the New American Imagination by Stephan Delbos

    Editors played a key role in American poetry after World War II
    Essays and Comment

  • The Gospel of Wildflowers and Weeds by Orlando Ricardo Menes reviewed by Andrea Read

    A World Graced by Disorder: Orlando Ricardo Menes’s The Gospel of Wildflowers and Weeds “I will not desist in finding…

    Book Review

  • When The Poet is a Master of Multiple Arts: Michelle Whittaker and Aaron Caycedo-Kimura; Interviews with Frances Richey

    William Blake, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Dylan, Bishop, Joni Mitchell, PJ Harvey, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon, Tom Waits, the list of multi-talented artists is endless.
    Featured Selection

  • Zwart, Wellman, Rivard, et. al.

    Jane Zwart on “Half the Time”: This poem owes its existence partly to Amit Majmudar, who invited me into a…

    Editors Note

  • From Night, by Ennio Moltedo, translated from Spanish by Marguerite Feitlowitz

    Can we go on like this?

  • Two Poems by Julia Nemirovskaya translated from Russian by Boris Dralyuk

    The thought that we might

  • SunRiders

    Lucy!

  • Lazarus

    She sucks the cigarette

  • Braid Him Into the Earth

    Knee-high coffin of wicker, earth-boat floating through the woods.

  • One of a Series

    My daughter sees the sky from another angle, slate-blue reflected in a lake called living. 

  • Half the Time

    In an emergency

  • Archaeologists

    Archaeologists found

  • Heroic Register

    I imagine a bed in the middle of a room.

  • Logs

    Giants lie entangled on wet sand,

  • Rabbit

    Regard the luckless cotton-tail,

  • A Brief Portfolio

    By then I was leaving,

  • When My Son Is Dead 14 Years

    These are the years I bargain with God.

  • The Light That Shines Out of the Marble by Chard DeNiord

    THE LIGHT THAT SHINES OUT OF THE MARBLE       In his visionary classic, The Marriage of Heaven and…

    Essays and Comment

  • Joan Houlihan, interview and poems from “It Isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest” with Ann van Buren

    This interview with Ann van Buren was conducted via Zoom and through e-mail, several months after the publication of It…

    Featured Selection

  • Timothy Liu reviews new books from Lynn Xu and Michael Chang

    I’m a fan of well-printed books. Handmade. Letter press.
    Book Review

  • Park, Andrews, Fried, et. al.

    Suphil Lee Park on translating Im Yunjidang: Korea has a long history of diglossia and linguistic oppression, from its wide…

    Editors Note

  • Excerpt from poem by Im Yunjidang translated from Hanja (via modern Korean) by Suphil Lee Park

    This shapeless blade

  • Two poems by Jan Wagner translated from German by David Keplinger 

    when you are digging in the wardrobe

  • Sonnet for a Tall Flower Blooming at Dinnertime

    Southern Flower, I want to quote the bard,

  • Three Poems

    It’s good to see him young again,

  • Unexceptional

    Except we were in love, or so it seemed.

  • War Poems

    Mangled tanks at rest on the roadway's shoulder.

  • Little Pea: A Brief Portfolio

    Sometimes I think I shouldn’t write about my past.

  • That ancient Egyptian poem

    Carved on a pillar—

  • Up Early, I Turn off the Television News

    High tide of sun curling & breaking onto the hardwood

  • Cataclysmic Paternity

    There’s the you at birth and the you that’s taught and the you you concocted.

  • Two Poems

    For the second time, yet not the last, in this

  • The Garden

    It just came at you. You were in it almost

  • The Cricket

    You too have risen at midnight

  • So I Would Move Among These Things: Maya Deren and The Witch’s Cradle by Fox Henry Frazier

    “I am hailed by all the girls as a sure poet,” Maya Deren wrote to her mother as a young undergraduate student.
    Essays and Comment

  • On Muse Found in a Colonized Body, lovemaking, and activism:  Interview with Yesenia Montilla by Mihaela Moscaliuc

    Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants.
    Featured Selection

  • Jane Zwart reviews “Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking” by C.T. Salazar

    One of the great, disorienting pleasures of C.T. Salazar’s first full-length collection of poems is how little level ground it contains.
    Book Review

  • From Pendant que Perceval tombait, by Tania Langlais, translated from French by Jessica Cuello

    you don’t know how to write with lightness

  • Pollock, Friman, Lehmann, et. al.

    James Pollock on “Dryer”: “Dryer” is one of four dozen poems about everyday technology that make up my book Durable…

    Editors Note

  • Snake Church and Patience, with Bees

    I’m Reverend Brody Coots

  • The End

    Whatever is coming is the end, but not really.

  • Shifts and Song for Sally

    Middle school cafeteria duty monitoring ungainly, dour

  • In the Mud Marks Reveal

    another story:

  • Old Man Swimming

    When the Old Man of the Sea shapeshifting on the bottom

  • Movie and Two Little Miners

    When I was ten    they took me into a coal mine

  • The Book of Before All This

    They're retrieving what's retrievable.

  • Dryer

    This seemingly permanent revolution,

  • Judith Beheading Holofernes

    No one ever read the Book of Judith to a slave—

  • Called to Lapse

    And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears

  • The Dog Days of August and Elaine’s Story

    What huge effort to move through

  • Contemporary Romanian Poets compiled by Radu Vancu

    Danny Lawless’s generous invitation for a Romanian presence in Plume placed in an awful embarras de choix: there is so…

    Featured Selection

  • Odyssey to the Self: Seven Minutes with Susan Rich and Nancy Mitchell

    When my mother took out the small skillet, black and flecked

  • Sven Birkerts on “The End” by Mark Strand

    I don’t know why this should be, but I find that many important things—I think of them as personal messages—come to me obliquely.
    Essays and Comment

  • Hassain, Schwartz, Hardwick, et. al.

    Jahangir Hossain on writing “Lover Rain”: The year was 2015/2016. I was present at the Saturday Literature Chat of the…

    Editors Note

  • David Baker’s “Whale Fall” reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar

    If in W.S. Merwin’s “For a Coming Extinction” the whales are on their way “to The End,”
    Book Review

  • Leprechaun

    The old woman next door would appear in

  • On Breathing and Not Breathing—The Sequence

    Once, a man stopped breathing

  • Hello, July 5th!

    The morning is full of embarrassed flowers

  • Two poems by Silvia Guerra, translated from Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas

    Pray gather me, Anemone

  • The Magician and HER

    This is how you peel back layers of bees

  • From A Line By Kawabata

    A solitary shadow in stillness

  • grief being a swatch of blue & grief being that song from childhood & grief being a pitched tent

    a rectangle in an unborn son’s room

  • Sitting on an Old Bedspread Under an Oak Tree, Watching My Son’s Soccer Practice

    For reasons I can’t explain

  • The Daughter and 6AM

    I wish I had another chance

  • Memento Mori: Northern White Rhinos

    They are grey, big as boulders,

  • Poem by Jahangir Hossain translated from the Bengali by Lloyd Schwartz with Jahangir Hossain

    I’ve come again—

  • The dream and Useless is as useless doesn’t

    For awhile I had a drawer full of electronic stuff,

  • PROTECT YOUR HOME (Interpret It Well), a short film with music by Ches Smith

    The composition has two movements, one slow and one fast.

  • Buckley, Levitin, Smith, et. al.

    Christopher Buckley on “Heisenberg’s Principle”: Again the argument of science vs. faith/fate . . . the two main tenents of…

    Editors Note

  • Salgado Maranhão’s “Mythic Ground” translated by Alexis Levitin

    For the living, this is the ground,

  • Ekaterina Derisheva’s “in the ‘war’ mode” and “Houses Discuss” translated by Tatiana Retivov

    while they sort out who helped more

  • The Book of Guests

    They gamboled toward me on the plain—two lambs

  • Genesis and The Anonymous City

    God made the world with his mouth.

  • Lesley Wheeler’s “Poetry’s Possible Worlds” reviewed by Jane Zwart

    In poetry and prose, Lesley Wheeler contends, “the ratio of sound to sense is different.”
    Book Review

  • Fragments of The Sacrificial World

    Porpoises feed every morning in the shallows

  • Football & the English Language

    My first year as high school coach, five points

  • ASH

    I shall go back

  • when it is time

    you pass that bridge

  • Beginning and Whatever Doesn’t Kill Your Mother Makes Her Stronger

    One of the first days my mom’s in the ICU, I try to describe

  • Blue Rim

    Set the table with your heirloom

  • Heisenberg’s Principle

    Look. We’re somewhere

  • Instagram

    What if I was uttered into existence through the teamwork of cultists

  • Done with Desire Forever: Color Music Poems of the 18th Century by Rosalind Holmes Duffy

    Regardless of how much eighteenth-century French poetry you read, you may be unfamiliar with the miniscule canon of verse about color music.
    Essays and Comment

  • FORGIVENESS/ACCEPTANCE, Sally Bliumis-Dunn

    For this feature, I solicited work from poets I admire that show this kind of psychological transformation and asked each writer to describe it as best they could.
    Featured Selection

  • Poetry: A Mirror, a Pencil and an Envelope. Seven Minutes with D. Nurkse and Nancy Mitchell

    In this candid interview, D. Nurkse reflects on a long life in poetry and political activism

  • A Travel Guide for the Exiled; An Interview with Zein El-Amine, by Leeya Mehta

    In April, we were lucky to spend time at the Annapolis Book Festival with Zein El-Amine. El-Amine grew up in Lebanon and now teaches and writes in Washington D.C., bringing his heart and words to our local literary community.
    Featured Selection

  • Small Scenes without Apology

    Remember the daughters.

  • (Blessed Are) They Who Preserve

    These glass jars are houses for little Human Acts.

  • Three Poems from a Work in Progress

    Deer in the backyard, Schubert’s ninth

  • Antonio Gamoneda, from Book of the Cold (World Poetry Books, May 2022) translated from Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

    You smell the wet linens, your acids.

  • Four From Delos

    Saw the ring of her

  • Lives of the Postmodern Poets

    You were born too late.

  • Forced March

    I remembered it wrong, the scene in the film

  • Rosenthal, Stratton, Aizenberg, et. al.

    Mira Rosenthal on translating Tomasz Różycki:   The poems “A Room” and “Wild Strawberries” come from Tomasz Różycki’s tenth book, Litery, forthcoming…

    Editors Note

  • Two poems by Tomasz Różycki translated from Polish by Mira Rosenthal

    Hello? If you can hear me, give a sign, a call,

  • Close to now

    I should have said from the beginning that I plant the black nasturtiums because they are the saddest

  • A Kind of Sorcery: On Shame, Defiance and Moral Imagination by Richard Hoffman

    A half-century ago, Kurt Vonnegut, in Slaughterhouse Five, wrote:
    Essays and Comment

  • Ashes of Roses and Blue Chair

    The early 19th Century rolls over

  • Spam Risk

    It was always a risk.

  • What Almost Killed You

    Hello, my  name is a long drive home from the bar

  • My Fifth Tattoo at the Darkstar Ink Parlor

    It takes a long time to get a tattoo

  • distant transit by Maya Haderlap reviewed by Mark Wagenaar

    “…is there a zone of darkness between all language, / a black river that swallows words / and stories and transforms them?”
    Book Review

  • The Wars Between the Wars Between the Borders that Were Not There

    You had to know how bad the Nazis were

  • Adam Vines’ “Lures” reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar

    If you read all of Adam Vines’s new collection, "Lures", and at the end of the book close your eyes and try to picture in your mind’s eye the book’s signature image
    Book Review

  • About Mending Walls…Sort of, by Sydney Lea

    The COVID-19 scourge has moved a horde of people to my home state,
    Essays and Comment

  • Resurrecting the Body of Beloved, which is the World in the Body of the Book; Transformation, Transcendence and Redemption and Interview with Gregory Orr by Nancy Mitchell

    Resurrecting the Body of Beloved, which is the World in the Body of the Book; Transformation, Transcendence and Redemption  …

    Featured Selection

  • Three Poems Translated by Brian Henry

    I’m not my own bacterium,

  • Hongo, Hirshfield, Andrews, et. al.

    Garrett Hongo on “To a Soldier in Ukraine”: Like everyone else, I’ve been horrified by the invasion and killings in…

    Editors Note

  • Memorial by Rigoberto Paredes translated from Spanish by Frances Simán

    return to the place where we left our life

  • In which I am confronted by a superhero

    I’m hitting fast forward to skip the gruesome bits of an Icelandic mystery

  • A Story of Mother Mary I Could Believe

    The woman who was Mary knew things.

  • The Latch

    One sound, the click of the latch on the gate,

  • Two poems by Louis-Philippe Dalembert translated from French by Nancy Naomi Carlson

    dune of a beauty

  • ABC Minors

    Painted in oils on wood, the entire composition

  • Strange     that Penelope

    does not question or pray in a selfish manner

  • I open the windows.

    What I wanted

  • To a Soldier in Ukraine

    A soldier must know three things—

  • Three Poems

    Resingeing his right palm each take,

  • Crow Poison

    stumbled drunkenly

  • Brian Culhane’s “Remembering Lethe” reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar

    Brian Culhane’s Remembering Lethe is remarkably, refreshingly cohesive.
    Book Review

  • Rome/Glasgow: Early March

    Our favorite time to visit—cool air for all-day walking, in

  • Embraced

    I have visited an ancient redwood and heard it creak

  • Mindfulness Training in La Jolla

    That summer of Pokémon-go,

  • Language Is a Form of Walking, Even at Age of 87 and Three, in One Story

    At 30, she learns to rewrite herself in a phonetic language,

  • Rubbish Heap translated by Sasha Dugdale

    I haven’t the strength to sing of you, resplendent rubbish heap!

  • Two poems by Adélia Prado (from Miserere) translated from Brazilian Portuguese by Ellen Doré Watson

    On what might be called a street,

  • Threnody and Sylvia Plath

    The train coach, Jean—empty except for you,

  • [from the volume 4 A.M. Domestic Cantos, Casa de editură Max Blecher, 2015]

    There will be people and they will push the world further.

  • Dickinson’s Facsicle 16:  A Book Review by Steven Cramer

    Steven Cramer both enlightens and entertains in his essay, “Dickinson’s Fascicle 16: A Book Review.” In his ambitious undertaking of…

    Essays and Comment

  • Rhodes, Shapiro, Moldaw, et. al.

    Martha Rhodes on “Embraced”: It’s awkward (for me) to talk about my own poems — I can just say that…

    Editors Note

  • D-Lev, Messenger by Nancy Mitchell

    We’re thrilled to talk with Dana Levin on the eve of the April 2022 debut of her amazing Now Do…

    Featured Selection

  • Shame

    Why did I want a Queen Conch shell

  • Stammer  (2 pp)

    Was I hatched from an egg, fostered by birds

  • Sweet Nothings

    I whispered to your offered ear

  • [I encircle you] translated by Sasha Dugdale

    I encircle you as a zone of mountains, granite corona

  • Zeeshan Khan Pathan’s “The Minister of Disturbances” and Allison Joseph’s “Lexicon” reviewed by Mark Wagenaar

    The poems in The Minister of Disturbances have a wide variety of settings, and jump around the globe
    Book Review

  • A Crucible of Rubies: Love Poems selected and written by the Plume Staff

    In celebration of Valentine’s day, we thought our readers might enjoy some poems written or selected by our Plume Staff.
    Featured Selection

  • Brown, Kress, Waldrop, et. al.

    Fleda Brown on “Someone is Walking a Pig”: There were the ordinary days. We call them that, now, since the…

    Editors Note

  • Story of My Species

    first she was in the ocean

  • A Story About Vietnam and Alexi Santana

    In a tiled bathroom stall, one chapter per tile,

  • A Brief Portfolio

    I remembered one day when I was new to that part of the city

  • Ocean Park

    Call this landscape abstract if the world’s splendour

  • Petrarch’s Poem 269, from Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, translated from Italian by Lee Harlin Bahan

    The high column and the green laurel

  • What Santa Asked When Lord Russell Argued that “Santa Claus” was a Definite Description and not a Referring Expression

    I tell my students to heed four things and they will be fine.

  • Poet at the Mall & Neuromythology

    Because language begins in body

  • Three Ghazals

    When I woke in the night, I walked to the center of the dream.

  • Museling, a Pastoral

    I’m reading a poem by a young woman,

  • Chronoscope 241:  Briefly

    Briefly: the glare sun below the clouds

  • Owls Was The Most Likely Explanation

    It’s pretty wild to think how long ago

  • The Public Servants and Amateur

    To be delivered by a sad man standing in a single light.

  • Someone Is Walking the Pig

    Someone is walking the pig in our downstairs hallway, where the shops are.

  • SAT PRACTICE TEST by Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade

    having an obstinately uncooperative attitude toward authority or discipline
    Essays and Comment

  • Carmine Starnino’s ‘Dirty Words’ reviewed by Mark Wagenaar

    For this month’s installment, I thought I’d wander a little farther afield—a little farther north
    Book Review

  • On Long Poems, Lyric Sequences, and “Cop”; An interview with Connie Voisine by Amanda Newell

    First, a hearty congratulations on being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship earlier this year...
    Featured Selection

  • Reading the Qur’an with Rumi by Amer Latif

    Amer Latif, a native of Islamabad, Pakistan and current professor of comparative religions and Islamic Studies at Emerson College who…

    Essays and Comment

  • de Voogt, Sadoff, Mitchell, et. al.

    Alex de Voogt on translating Cavafy: In 1915, Constantine Cavafy wrote a poem with hemistiches, a set number of syllables…

    Editors Note

  • A Poem Translated from Greek by Alex de Voogt

    He went inside the café     where they would go together.

  • I’m Not Waiting and Out of the Past

    I’m no longer waiting for the dunes of Tulum,

  • Death and the Miser

    When death comes, it all goes:

  • The Twenties

    Consider the twenties, not Gatsby, not Daisy, not that old Roaring,

  • Two poems by Katja Gorečan (from The Sufferings of Young Hana /Trpljenje mlade Hane) translated from Slovenian by Martha Kosir

    hana likes to sit on the balcony when it rains.

  • Sister Dementia Remembers & Phone Booth

    Enough of bosom, ass, and pillow—

  • What I learned from ‘Saved by the Bell’

    Only half a dozen people actually exist

  • Willem Van de Velde the Younger, Ships in a Gale (1660) and Matsumura Goshun, Crab (late 18th century)

    The storm dissolves the difference between wave,

  • Seesaw

    The sun was overhead. The playground steamed.

  • Dust

    You return with us to the grave,

  • Three Stages of Friendship and Grief

    I was wondering if your eyelashes had fallen out

  • When We Make Lifelines, the Universe Breathes a Little Easier

    When night becomes heavy, I break a hole

  • A Controlled Substance

    My brother is late again, somehow the glass

  • Dear Meat

    What's your point?

  • Letter to My Almost Former House

    It’s true, I’m getting ready to leave you.

  • Kanchan, Burns, Scopino, et. al.

    Virginia Konchan on “Liquidation”: “Liquidation” was written at the height of the pandemic, after reading a list of products made obsolete…

    Editors Note

  • All These Red and Yellow Things: Short Papers on Art by Lesle Lewis

    In her ekphrastic essay, “All These Red and Yellow Things, Short Papers on Art,” Lesle Lewis writes with a refreshingly observant…

    Essays and Comment

  • Devon Walker-Figueroa’s Philomath reviewed by Jeri Theriault

    Philomath by Devon Walker-Figueroa Milkweed Editions paperback 104 pages ISBN: 978-1-57131-522-9       The poems in Philomath, Devon Walker-Figueroa’s…

    Book Review

  • Liquidation

    Final closeout, clearance sale, you said:

  • From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus / The Sonnets to Orpheus translated from German by John Rosenwald

    O fountain-mouth, you gift-giver, you mouth

  • Two poems translated from Spanish by Adriana Scopino

    What a fire is kindled in the windows

  • Alone at 77 & I Arrive at the Scene

    Unhungry, he cracks a single egg.

  • The Sun Pours Forth & An American in Paris

    We are in a garden among friends

  • At the Frick Collection in New York City

    Such a small work by Giambattista Tiepolo, Perseus and Andromeda

  • What a Man Wants is the Power to Name the Terms of His Rescue

    If I had that power,

  • HOUSEKEEPING:  Frida’s Future Kiss

    After the palm reader told her no man would ever claim her,

  • Notes on an Illness in Spain & the grist of gratitude is like ingratitude

    The sinuous ripple of a well-broken in fan, a soft hand

  • Cockatiel & View From Another Planet

    Wild for it to end

  • A Brief Portfolio

    Like conifers in the Bois de Boulogne where he would walk

  • Pain & Ophelia and the Nine-and-Fifty Swans

    Where to stand

  • Jewish American Women Poets by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

    For this PLUME feature, I chose four Jewish American women poets, Jennifer Barber, Jessica Greenbaum, Judy Katz and Nomi Stone.
    Featured Selection

  • Kasey Jueds’s “The Thicket” reviewed by Jane Zwart

    “The thicket / swells with secrets,” Kasey Jueds writes in the poem “Unbidden,”
    Book Review

  • Buckley, Ramspeck, Johnson, et. al.

    Christopher Buckley on “Existential” and “Refugee”:   Both of these poems are from a new book, The Consolations of Science…

    Editors Note

  • Nail tr. by Anita Gopalan

    A piece of heart that doesn’t pain on breaking

  • On Peach State and crafting “the raw materials of circumstance”: An interview with poet Adrienne Su by Mihaela Moscaliuc

    On Peach State and crafting “the raw materials of circumstance”: An interview with poet Adrienne Su   Adrienne Su is…

    Featured Selection

  • Refugee & Existential

    I read the Spanish for any clue,

  • Major Brands…

    Cloth covers a woman’s face so we

  • Reading Julio Cortázar after turning 70

    Years ago, there was your story about a man named John Howell.

  • Acne

    And I’d see it that way, the word, all

  • Mommie

    After I’m dead, will the world will remember me

  • Bee Line

    Maybe the crow flies

  • What If a House Could Draw its Own Blueprints? and The Decision

    The house grows wild, floats

  • Paying a Blind Man to Wash and Wax My Car

    Maybe they’re right, friends who mock me,

  • the midwest sheds its skin

    & leaves it clinging to a fence post

  • Sources And Outcomes & Through The Hospital Corridor

    Too many moons crossing in solitude

  • Pomade

    It has been so long since anyone has touched it

  • Beipei, Low Water, Winter 1985

    Li Ping is peeling

  • Endecasyllabics: About the Women (Alma, Ruthie)

    The lion-maned poet holds court on our blue

  • Christopher Buckley on NAMING THE LOST: THE FRESNO POETS; interview by Nancy Mitchell

    NAMING THE LOST: THE FRESNO POETS Interviews & Essays edited by Christopher Buckley Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2021…

    Featured Selection

  • The Solotaroff Protocol, by David Kirby

    On April 14, 1994, Barbara and I were driving from Tallahassee to Baton Rouge to visit my parents and decided to split our journey with an overnight stay in Fairhope
    Essays and Comment

  • Prins, Andrews, Barbarese, et. al.

    Richard Prins on Translating Muhammad Kijuma: These verses of Muhammad Kijuma were collected under the category “political songs” in Mohammad…

    Editors Note

  • “Truscon, A Division of Republic Steel, 1969-70: A Prose-Poem Sequence Disguised as a Lyrical Essay, Itself Aspiring to Be a Fictional Memoir” by Peter Johnson

    Peter Johnson’s essay, “Truscon, A Division of Republic Steel, 1969-70: A Prose Poem Sequence Disguised as a Lyrical Essay, Itself…

    Essays and Comment

  • Sean Thomas Dougherty’s Not All Saints Reviewed by Sonia Greenfield

    Sean Thomas Dougherty’s Not All Saints, his thirteenth full-length collection
    Book Review

  • Mr. Palomar’s Wave

    A long time ago, I went with my aunt to hear

  • Whirlybird & Poets

    This whirlybird

  • Lush & Fair-Flung

    You’re thinking of drunks,

  • Three Poems

    Being adopted means I have choices on “The Meaning of Your Name”

  • Early Explorers Sometimes Carried Watermelons Instead of Canteens & Close Your Eyes

    Ever cut open a watermelon

  • [The Porcupine Left Its Hovel]

    The porcupine left its hovel

  • Relapse

    I loved bar light,

  • Practicing Quiet & The Last Sleep Artist

    What do you mean, you ate Melvin?

  • Eros Caught Napping

    Eros at one time or another in the era before

  • Lightning Streak of White

    Black streets, black sky with orchid clouds.

  • Oxalis in the Ingleside & Zucchini in August

    You can find the world’s second largest sundial

  • Lion Cub & Whales

    We’d taken to being clever, or is that merely mischievous?

  • Seven Minutes with Mary Halvorson: Poetry and Jazz, Hand in Hand

    Artlessly falling through overstretched arms delivers the night underground, a hole

  • Wolf Wine Bar

    Two years ago, maybe even two and a half

  • John Wall Barger’s “Resurrection Fail” reviewed by Cameron MacKenzie

    John Wall Barger Resurrection Fail. New York Spuyten Duyvil 2021. 100 pgs.   Director Michael Mann, when asked why he…

    Book Review

  • Pastan, Hanzliček, Nazarene, et. al.

    Linda Pastan on “Truce”, “Class Notes” & “On Rereading the 23rd Psalm”: I was an adolescent when I first read…

    Editors Note

  • Some Thoughts on the Sublime Irony of Nothing and the Divine Imagination by Chard DeNiord

    SOME THOUGHTS ON THE SUBLIME IRONY OF NOTHING AND THE DIVINE IMAGINATION                      “The most sublime act is…

    Essays and Comment

  • Savagely clear-eyed: An interview with writer, flamenco singer, and literary translator Amaia Gabantxo by Mihaela Moscaliuc

    Amaia Gabantxo is a writer, singer and literary translator specialized in Basque literature—a pioneer in the field and its greatest contributor.
    Featured Selection

  • Security: A Q & A

    What was your favorite part-time job? What do you

  • Duets

    Telemann at 7:30 on an evening

  • Three Poems

    Last night R—, who I stole

  • Litterature

    I am pleased

  • Pull Off on Old Lyme Road to Fuck

    Because I would have given everything for you to want to talk to me you remain the sound of street lamps

  • Bed

    I haven’t got a fingernail or bed

  • Want

    How do I want you? Let me count the ways.

  • A Brief Portfolio

    As the fight went on my father set

  • Blueshift

    In another life I’m a cosmologist, lungs snow-

  • Agreeable Subjects

    When a past father of mine makes an appearance

  • The Window & On Turning 79

    I check the den window a few times each day

  • Truce, Class Notes & On Rereading the 23rd Psalm

    My high school class of 1950

  • A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye

    It’s not criminal: it isn’t sodomy

  • Seven Minutes with Afaa Weaver and Nancy Mitchell

    Were it not for his silver hair

  • So This is the Future & Hope

    After I found out––

  • Veronica Golos interviewed by Amy Beeder

    Veronica Golos is author of four books of poetry, most recently Girl (3: A Taos Press, 2019) which Ilya Kaminsky…

    Featured Selection

  • Duckler, Pelizzon, deNiord, et. al.

    Merridawn Duckler on “Gonzalez-Torres at the Solstice” and “Why they Revere the Alcoholic Neighbor”: I once thought I’d be an…

    Editors Note

  • The Only Critic by J.T. Barbarese

    J.T. Barbarese makes the trenchant claim in his essay “The Only Critic” that memory itself serves as the  “only critic”…

    Essays and Comment

  • Robert Alexander’s “Finding Token Creek” reviewed by Sonia Greenfield

    Finding Token Creek: New & Selected Writing, 1975-2020 Robert Alexander White Pine Press April 2021 ISBN: 978-1-945680-441   The Sacred…

    Book Review

  • Qinghai and Tengchong

    a prayer flag rolls around a heap of round stones

  • Snow and Minerals

    Rouge. It’s not a rose, it’s rouge.

  • Cassandra

    Some days I could go quietly into the spot where

  • Gonzalez-Torres at the Solstice and Why they Revere the Alcoholic Neighbor

    Everyone guzzled what light there was leftover,

  • Poem Beginning with a Line from Levis

    As if we’re put on the earth to forget the ending,

  • Voyager parable and Parable of the Little Ghost

    Today I am downhearted meaning sunken meaning mired

  • The Widow at Point Reyes and Broncoscopy

    She sat for an hour watching 10,000 tiny silver fish

  • Medieval Notation and Mercy

    On the first half of our hike the snow

  • The Piece

    Some years ago I painted the room gray.

  • Of Silk and Missive & Between Tree and Rocket

    Did our adolescent lips heat once or more under one or many star falls between sands on a northern American

  • Memories, Friends in Dreams, and Reflections on the Poet’s Life and some Advice to Young Poets: Seven Minutes with John Skoyles and Nancy Mitchell

    Memories, Friends in Dreams, and Reflections on the Poet’s Life and some Advice to Young Poets
    Featured Selection

  • For Your Eighteenth Birthday

    Not a car nor papa’s advice.

  • Escude, LaFemina, Buchinger, et. al.

    Alejandro Escude on “A Streetcar Named Panera”: I wrote “A Streetcar Named Panera” pretty much as I was going through…

    Editors Note

  • The Opposite of Silence: Poetry Interposes by T.R. Hummer

    The dream, in medias res, founders on the grinding of a garbage truck
    Essays and Comment

  • Letter to a Cyclist and Early Spring

    The cyclist who’s rushing for the usual gold

  • The Rehearsal

    At our first duo rehearsal—Bach’s B-

  • Inauguration Day

    Yes, like thousands of joyful poets today

  • The Interview

    Where is your wheel? Your bike-body? Sturdy-car-self?

  • The Just Measure and Eels

    I stay here on the balcony after the rain, peering at the sky of a rocky landscape,

  • After the War for Independence and Despite Nostalgia

    Those boys in the basement, middle-schoolers, unruly

  • In Which the Sea Rakes at My Window and Seemingly Unlike Me

    and I wake rattled, as if to resist a long fall

  • Auntie Deluvian and Alien On The Ark: Two by Two

    Deep-time they called it when King Dumuzid the Shepherd

  • February Elegy with Tulips on a Glass Table

    It’s the yellow dust inside the tulips.

  • Elements and A Streetcar Named Panera

    An abandoned father heals,

  • I Was Reading the Sunlight, I Was Planting the Words on this Page

    I know why Cicero says

  • On Psalm 91 and Maestro Says

    And daily, I read:

  • Two Poems

    War catches a man with a shopping bag

  • Jen Sperry Steinorth: On Creating and Claiming Space with Her Read by Amanda Newell

    I had the pleasure of interviewing Jen Sperry Steinorth about her new book,
    Featured Selection

  • Two Poems

    Save forever my words for the taste of a smoke and disaster,

  • Worldly Things by Michael Kleber-Diggs reviewed by Jane Zwart

    Review of Worldly Things. Michael Kleber-Diggs. Milkweed. June 8, 2021. $22.   Worldly Things is the name of Michael Kleber-Diggs’s…

    Book Review

  • Heard in Caravaggio

    The real is offered, unashamed:

  • The Hölderliniae by Nathaniel Tarn reviewed by Devin King

    My favorite book by Nathaniel Tarn was not written by Nathaniel Tarn.
    Book Review

  • Oxygen & Waking to 1939, I Study Those Standing

    I’m sorry my mother got a blood clot in her lung

  • The Solid Objects of Stagnant Empires by Irina Mashinski

    “The Myth” and “Jew” are two excerpts from The Naked World, a story of four generations of one family,
    Essays and Comment

  • Hawkins, Withiam, Cooley, et. al.

    Hunt Hawkins on “To the Poets Dropped from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry”:   In addition to creative writing,…

    Editors Note

  • Ever Wish We’d Gone Beyond Being Friends? and My Auto Dealership

    You asked. I’m remembering the vacation island

  • What You Can’t Fix

    She was always fixing me, stuffing filler in my holes

  • Fatherless Daughters

    In Springtime, abandoned daughters burst like myopic butterflies with binoculars

  • To the Poets Dropped from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry

    Au revoir, Walter de la Mare!

  • Trash

    Good you are trashing, my husband says, when I send him a photo

  • Doorbell: 5:14 AM

    The policeman touches

  • Two Poems

    The clarity of familiar faces

  • Fable 7, 8 & 9

    I knew a boy with swastikas on his sneakers. I never knew the story.

  • Amaryllis

    Like the bell of an old Victrola,

  • Five Contemporary Love Songs edited by Leeya Mehta

    TISHANI DOSHI ♦ RAJIV MOHABIR JERRY PINTO ♦ ARUNDHATI SUBRAMANIAM ♦ JEET THAYIL   I had an idea earlier this…

    Featured Selection

  • The Mind’s Meander: Indirection, Ambiguity, and Association in Poetry by Rachel Hadas

    I’ve been musing about the benefits of indirection – or call it obliquity,
    Essays and Comment

  • Three poems from Kembang Kertas (Balinese for bougainvillea) in Filipino and Kinaray-a

    Here, we are told

  • Dunphy-Lelii, Armantrout, Johnson, et. al.

    Sarah Dunphy-Lelii on “in common” and “gentrify”: I spent five months tent-living at a field site in western Uganda, hiking…

    Editors Note

  • One poem from “claus and the scorpion”

    over lara and among the laras that inhabit lara

  • Two poems from “The Mistaken Place of Things”

    How to say hair

  • Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar

    Valzhyna Mort’s Music for the Dead and Resurrected is unlike anything else I can remember reading for a long time.
    Book Review

  • Of The Heart, A Hymn & Interracial love affair ended by lynching of a man & let there be a song for zero

    Your name is ash

  • in common and gentrify

    My neighbor Steve is one of these lawn guys, with an engined solution for every yard flaw.

  • Other Minds and While

    For each word

  • Vaccination, in the Broadest Sense of the Term, Crickets and Lucky Strike Lanes

    Just as the pharmacist drove the vaccine into my arm

  • Physics & Green Room

    Was Jesus materializing inside a locked room

  • Found Poem: “Swelling Anti-Asian Violence: Who Is Being Attacked Where,” NYT, April 3, 2021 

    Queens | A 47-year-old man and his 10-year-old son

  • Black Forest and Country Night

    Sometimes my mind goes back to certain things.

  • Squirrel Hour

    The wind goes into the backyard pines,

  • Hanging the Dirty Laundry

    Father's ties were mother’s noose

  • On Lust

    I've outlived lust, or think I have.

  • L’Heure Bleue

    Who was the first to say darkness “falls”?

  • Review of Steven Cramer’s Listen by Andrea Read

    That time when one can no longer wander away
    Book Review

  • Notnames at the Detroit Institute of the Arts and Hell Fuckin’ Yeah:  Smackdown vs. Raw

    At the Detroit Institute of the Arts the Caravaggio’s no

  • A Canticle Rehearsal in The Temple and The Waters Do Not Return, Even to Meribà

    Oh, I am tired of my land,

  • Correspondence In The Air by Ilya Kaminsky and Twilight of the Theorists by Doug Anderson

    Octavio Paz once wrote that the modern poet “extracts his visions from within himself.”
    Essays and Comment

  • Ambassadors of Poetry Prevail in the United States of Pandemica by Nancy Mitchell

    In honor of National Poetry Month I interviewed five Poet Laureates
    Featured Selection

  • Richey, Tobin, Dower, et. al.

    Frances Richey on “The Seven Secrets of Our-Lady”: When my son was serving in Iraq (2004-2006), I wrote some short…

    Editors Note

  • Promiscuous and Thanking My Breasts

    Promiscuous is what my mother

  • The Silver Bullet

    When I wasn’t washing my hands, I remembered

  • While

    While we were kissing that year, the icebergs were sleeping,

  • Two poems by Natalia Toledo, in trilingual translation (Zapotec to Spanish to English)

    Mantis mantis I want to know

  • The Seven Mysteries of Our-Lady Madonna

    They emerge out of distance,

  • Reading About Keith Jarrett This Morning in the Paper and Ode to the Table of Contents

    how he probably won’t play in public again

  • Beautiful Worry

    this wan light, spaghetti-thin, uneases

  • Harvest

    Like someone who has spent long hours among the vines,

  • Intelligent Design & Miramar Point

    7, 8, 9 years old,

  • Feral

    Ex. A house. A trampoline. A raised garden bed. A Ford Bronco. A Cabbage Patch doll

  • Overdetermination (It’s Not as Boring As It Sounds) by David Kirby

    You want your poems to be like you: fully alive.
    Essays and Comment

  • PETITION by Joyce Peseroff reviewed by DeWitt Henry

    Carnegie Mellon University Press 2020 $15.95 78pp. paper ISBN 978-0-88748-861-6   Joyce Peseroff has been a personal friend since she…

    Book Review

  • A Girl Who Doesn’t Believe in Myths & I Have No One With Whom I Can Spit Toothpaste At Turns Into The Sink

    we went to the prophetess

  • Three Poems

    A little man was sleeping in the bright sunlight

  • Ode to Disarmament

    I am fairly sure that the leafhopper

  • An Interview with Ann Arbor by Leeya Mehta

    Summer is Coming
    Featured Selection

  • Before and Rain

    Sweatpants balled up where his legs would be,

  • Mid-March

    If, when I sit here in my study

  • Spit from the Universe Magnified

    SIN. Lust in an exotic land. A

  • Master Class

    Demonstrate on mine, I say.

  • Destinations

    Why is it that the memory my mind chose

  • Three Poems

    Mud to your waist. Beside you, six men probing with broken

  • Mort, Silano, Friman, et. al.

    Jo-Ann Mort on “Destinations”: This poem began exactly as I write it. For some unknown reason, I flashed on to…

    Editors Note

  • Twelve Wings & Mother of the Holy Hope

    It was difficult to get a nurse.

  • Pandemic Fugue

    These are the skies of my childhood

  • One for André Breton

    Always for the first time

  • I was trying to weigh darkness

    I was trying to weigh darkness how much does darkness weigh

  • The Dirty Orgasm, The Eleanor Ross Taylor Poems & Aren’t You Ashamed

    I know what you think. I’m the orgasm poet. I have nothing else to write about. I should stop.

  • knell & i object i object i object

    the chit-a’click-chit of a squirrel

  • Bear Sometimes Thinks He’s Dead & Shelf Life

    But lately he’s observed the Hermit Thrush

  • The Encounter

    Drizzle and formless

  • A Frozen Present: D. Nurkse on the Language of Fascism and “The Land of Magic”

    This timely essay, which is also a trenchant exegesis of Henri Michaux’s unfinished poem “The Land of Magic,” witnesses to…

    Essays and Comment

  • John Wall Barger Reviews That Was Now, This Is Then by Vijay Seshadri

    “Eternity,” Heraclitus wrote, “is a child playing checkers; a child’s kingdom.”
    Book Review

  • An interview with Teri Ellen Cross Davis by Leeya Mehta

    An interview with Teri Ellen Cross Davis by Leeya Mehta     Today is January 20th, a historic day that…

    Featured Selection

  • Seaton, Hadas, Sholl, et. al.

    Maureen Seaton on “Heretical Physics”: “Heretical Physics” changed shape dramatically several times before it landed on the pages of PLUME.…

    Editors Note

  • Double Effect: December 31

    the bridge closes behind you

  • Four Poems

    Unable to return from my ashes

  • Three Poems

    These dead again and again

  • Letters from Earth & Sky

    The petals

  • The Window Light, The Dead Boy Isn’t Dad & The Window Light Again

    Painting around the windowsill

  • Thanksgiving Near Cape Coast & Pine Cones: April 2020

    Churning along through viscous mud,

  • MISSA CORONA SPINEA Good Friday, Macomb County

    On one side of one dumpster

  • August City Night & Love in Kyiv

    stifles, thick stream

  • Butchery

    They do it right here in the front yard in Wellsville,

  • Heretical Physics & Mermaid Rescued by EMTs in Colorado

    When I was englobed in subatomic quarks and bosons floating

  • The Other Hemisphere & Like California

    It shut us up, the new, dumbed us

  • The Mending Wall

    No one noticed as I left both the tour group

  • The Cocoon, I Started Slowly & Morning’s Only Yellow

    Visiting my cousin’s church I found

  • Solstice, Seven Questions (Private/Public) & A Fable

    blood on a slide--thumbprint in a pool--

  • Earth, Temple, Gods

    A woman's feet, in lace-up sandals made of stone.

  • Favorite Books from 2020

    Plume has a number of talented editors, and given the extraordinary year the world faced, I thought asking them for…

    Book Review

  • Why I Make Poetry Comics by Bianca Stone

    I think some part of me that was always emotionally stunned beneath a tarp wanted to make poetry slide into art
    Essays and Comment

  • Guinzio, Fuchtman, Hartman, et. al.

    Carolyn Guinzio On “PIER”: PIER is from a long poem sequence called V. The piece enters the interior universe of…

    Editors Note

  • Chanda Feldman and Erika Meitner interviewed by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

    Welcome Chanda Feldman and Erika Meitner to our PLUME feature.
    Featured Selection

  • After Our Parents Get Divorced, Our Mother Buys an Ivy Stencil

    In the small white bedroom

  • Four Square and Enthralled

    Mornings I’m grateful to my nightly self

  • Christmas Nineteen-Sixty-Something and Notes from My Doppelganger

    By that time we were hanging the tree from a hook

  • You Don’t Drink Wine? and I Tremble: Two poems by Rumi

    What? You don’t drink wine? Infidel, begone!

  • Two Exhausted Bodies

    My insides are a flooded field. Though the field outside is larger and I have played there, laid

  • Gertrude Suite, [Mechthild Says God is a Bell] & Lazarus

    Semantic, in the way that interruption is semantic.

  • when you ask me if you are a good father & cook up meets god

    look     we know how this will play out

  • Valediction in Guatemala

    We say goodbye in front

  • Pier

    If the pier is two hundred and fifty words long, it is important

  • Across the Wide Missouri

    It’s toward the end of the season.

  • The NewMath and Nor Easter

    There may still be time to find the cosine of x. Under an à la mode

  • Five Per Page and Title covered in flies

    Yard sticks and shards are kept in a jar shaped as a cowboy boot.

  • Dear Stuart

    Bruce Weigl What it Means to Lose a Teacher Under Quarantine “Write it down, just like you told me.” SF…

    Featured Selection

  • Carlson, Pastan & Smith, et. al.

    I’m not good at writing timely poems, poems that “speak to the historical moment.
    Editors Note

  • Consecration of the Wolves I and IV

    For now, I will await

  • The Clearing by Allison Adair reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar

    THE CLEARING Allison Adair Milkweed Editions, 2020 79 pages. $22, hardcover.     Allison Adair’s The Clearing opens with two…

    Book Review

  • The Beautiful American Word Baby

    Once, I wanted it growled low in the throat

  • A Tall Bird 

    on the one hand, beauty remains.

  • Tartine. Quasi-unfamiliar. To handle a relationship

    In her teenage years,

  • THE LAND OF ULRO: Czeslaw Milosz on William Blake by Bill Tremblay

    When I taught, I’d occasionally walk from my office to the Art Department to view the latest exhibit
    Essays and Comment

  • Across the Wide Missouri

    It’s toward the end of the season

  • This Moment

    You know when darkness seems to pour

  • Bending Truth to Advantage

    From Robert Lowell’s poem “Those Before Us,” these final lines: “Pardon them for existing.

  • August, Hinge

    How would you describe these pandemic days,

  • Sequoia

    Immune to lightning and Arctic cold,

  • On Chanukah

    Isn’t fire itself

  • Shakedown, Sleeping Mother and The Touch

    On Main Street, two cops stop me in front of the tire store. One is big and burly and the other is lean

  • The Village Crow

    The village crow knew everything—

  • Chekhov’s Gun

    Atonement means nothing to a cook

  • “Alias” by Eric Pankey reviewed by Mark Wagenaar

    Alias Eric Pankey Free Verse Editions, Parlor Press 2020   Not to be confused with the television show of the…

    Book Review

  • Before Summer Rain

    Then, out of the green of the grove,

  • On Queer Poetics, Writing Courageously, and Becoming Otherwise: An Interview with Nomi Stone by Amanda Newell

    I'm interested in the ways in which your poetry contemplates the relationship between the self and the community and the ways in which community shapes identity.
    Featured Selection

  • Greenbaum, Collins and Dolin, et. al.

    Jessica Greenbaum on “Why I Started Writing a Novel”:   One of the voices in my poems might be the…

    Editors Note

  • Winter Morning and Ceci n’est pas un pot

    I can easily imagine someone always doubting before he opened his front door whether

  • The Edson Letters by Peter Johnson

    As Russell Edson’s close friend and faithful correspondent during the last twenty five years of his life, Peter Johnson initiated…

    Essays and Comment

  • Lamentations

    America    more guns    more    than us

  • Zone 

    This ancient world finally leaves you weary

  • Why I Started Writing a Novel

    Earlier today I started writing a novel out of the simple

  • Communion

    Yes, I will take home the meeting bread,

  • House of Sorrow, Vessel of Anarchy, I Will Not Name It Except to Say, Golem

    Once I made a box to put a man in.

  • Two poems by Muyaka bin Haji, (1776—1840)

    When she lays eggs, they’re not nurtured even if brooding them succeeds.

  • A Brief Portfolio

    When Doris the hen

  • Hanger

    You needed one

  • Using these questions, would you please write a brief description of yourself?

    My favorite creature is the tree porcupine.

  • Embryo

    All morning, pitting the apricots

  • St. Bonaventure and Spring Birthday Romance

    Merton’s last stop in the world

  • She said she saw, Maya Lin and At night, I tried

    She said she saw her own veins

  • A Hard Road by Charles Coe

    In July of 2016, I was on my way to the Chautauqua Institution, a summer cultural resort in southwestern New York
    Essays and Comment

  • Brett Foster’s “Extravagant Rescues” reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar

    In the abcedarian list poem “Alternative Titles for the Book You Are Holding in Your Hands,” Brett Foster offers ...
    Book Review

  • Johnson, Sholl, Moss, et. al.

    Peter Johnson On “The Last Dance,” “Nice Socks,” and “My Friend,”: My most recent book is called Old Man Howling…

    Editors Note

  • Locked Gate

    On December 19, 1980

  • francine j harris Interviewed by Amy Beeder

    francine j harris’ third book Here is the Sweet Hand, with which she “fully emerges as one of the best…

    Featured Selection

  • A Brief Portfolio of Six Poems

    told us Hollywood was a verb on the painted stretcher &    fretting,

  • Notes From Sick Rooms

    Who really wants to be a caregiver?

  • Taking It Back

    Two weeks past Epiphany,

  • The Shadow of Love

    A man falls in love with a shadow

  • The Worm

    The sun: a worm with a spring withy in its jaws.

  • Always a Woman, a War, or a Lost Cause

    That hunched those men over Zorro’s

  • Romanian Lessons & The Country of Leaving

    Godmother country,

  • My Friend, Nice Socks & The Last Dance

    My friend wanted to have breakfast at the local strip club.

  • The Book of Forgotten Geniuses

    I can understand why the Egyptians

  • A Brief Portfolio of Six Poems

    The pond flattered the foliage,

  • A Singleton & Self Portrait: Between the Car and the Sea

    They climb to their lookout, each day, different,

  • Whatever Alights

    A zillion yeses to the titmice at my feeder,

  • Ranjit Hoskote interviewed by Leeya Mehta

    Chronicler of a Blue Planet: An audio interview with Ranjit Hoskote by Leeya Mehta Ranjit Hoskote has lived, for most…

    Featured Selection

  • Hailey Leithauser’s Saint Worm reviewed by Susan Blackwell Ramsey

    The heart of a bear is a cloud-shuttered
    Book Review

  • from Brexit suivi de la migration des murs (Les Éditions Diable Vauvert 2020) Translated from French by Nathan Dize and Siobhan Meï

    Once upon a poster, let’s call it

  • Horoscope and American Upanishad

    Two hearts can charge the moment they meet,

  • An Invasion

    We waited and waited, or by we

  • Out of Fresno—Poetry & “Career” by Christopher Buckley

    Philip Larkin—one of the most popular British Poets among my generation in the US—replying to an interview
    Essays and Comment

  • Dunn, Mabbitt, Slate, et. al.

    Sally Bliumis-Dunn on “Northern Flicker” and “Where the Robins Took Me”: I wrote “Northern Flicker” near the beginning of the…

    Editors Note

  • Riding the Metro-North New Haven Line and Black Mountain Music

    The question is what kind of sausage are they—

  • safe / harbor / rehab

    you said your eyes

  • The Last Harvest

    Of course the snake is still here

  • Down by the River

    Down by the river behind the barn

  • Strychnine Tree

    Stranger under this love-sick tree, lapful of terminal clusters

  • In Purgatory

    Not easy.

  • Country of Other Arrangements and Spinach Salad

    I used to be neatly folded, sound

  • The Dangers of Contemplation

    Follow the seagull aloft

  • Where the Robins Took Me and Northern Flicker

    Robins settle on the earth

  • All That Evening

    You woke slowly

  • Armorial and The World is Burning

    At least once or twice a season I take out

  • Oak Leaves as Young Musicians and Longing

    Frosted-glass window lit orange.

  • Donovan McAbee reviews Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry by John Murillo

      John Murillo Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry 2020 Four Way Books $16.95 Paperback     Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, John Murillo’s second…

    Book Review

  • Armantrout, Skloot, Barger, et. al.

    Rae Armantrout On “Blues”: This poem is an encounter between the ordinary objects and events of my morning and a…

    Editors Note

  • Since Childhood & The Virgin’s Miracles translated by Don Schofield

    Think of the body on the sand,

  • Bodies on the Margins

    The artist understands blood; or rather

  • From Lewisburg to Syracuse: An interview with Bruce Smith by Chard deNiord

    By June, by muggy, iffy June of 1968 I had received a draft notice
    Featured Selection

  • Meditation on a Shower Rod at the Super 8

    You and I are snake bit. Can we postpone?

  • Remote Stars

    Look up. There’s Bill,

  • spattered measure

    what beauty O sad world through answers

  • The Last Plume Poems

    the year that is when Churchill begged

  • Nesting & a triptych

    At my parents’ house nothing is in boxes, nothing is packed.

  • Inviting the Reader: Narrative Values, Lyric Poems by Sydney Lea

    Inviting the Reader: Narrative Values, Lyric Poems by Sydney Lea   The editor of an online journal recently asked 25…

    Essays and Comment

  • The Triumphs of 1974 & A Self-Guided Tour of Machu Picchu, OR Please, Sir/Madam, Step Away from the Edge of the Abyss

    Moneyless, we moved to Cali,

  • An Island

    Toward the end of the island

  • Family Way

    In my family, when any one of the women of my grandmother’s generation dreamt of fish she would get on the phone to

  • Blues

    Why is there careful language

  • At the perennial exchange

    At the perennial exchange, you will swap half a hosta

  • Undomesticated

    The large goose does what it always will,

  • A Progressive Disease

    I feel my body getting away from me,

  • Dear American Amnesia

    I know you are only trying to make

  • Oracle, Mallarmé & Stone

    A broken rib could be the sign

  • Shooting Pool in the Mental Hospital

    Because memory is not the hovering bank shot that stops at the lip

  • Jane Hirshfield’s “Ledger” reviewed by Fred Marchant

    Some ledgers are just right for business accounting, with neat columns for inventories,
    Book Review

  • Caliche Sand and Clay: Five Albuquerque Poets

    I spoke with five women from Albuquerque: poets and also―variously―fiction writers, essayists, instructors, activists, artists, parents and caretakers.
    Featured Selection

  • The Barricade

    The barricade measures two meters high and twelve meters wide

  • Straumsvåg, Friman & Samaras, et. al.

    Dag T. Straumsvåg on “The Barricade”: I started writing “The Barricade” on the night Donald Trump was elected President of…

    Editors Note

  • It’s Called the Renaissance, You Know, or The Soul Sibling Report by David Kirby

    “Lady and gentlemen,” said composer Dimitri Tiomkin in his 1955 Academy Awards acceptance speech
    Essays and Comment

  • Norumbega Park

    They used to say the name was Viking

  • Learning to Play It Again

    While my daughter was learning Clementi —

  • Separate Cars

    Just happens is what I fear most. A couple grown insular,

  • A Brief Portfolio: Five Poems

    I found this suitcase slumped in a dark attic corner

  • Beards & The Gospel According to Ian Fleming

    During my sleep, the entire world had been taken over by full beards.

  • Corona & At a Time Like This

    A miniscule David without

  • flail, snap, struggle & These Long Afternoons

    strangle, some eaten out by an infestation

  • The Rainbow Sign, The Shirt and After All

    God gave Noah the rainbow sign,

  • Bedtime Story

    It wasn’t only my father who believed in the romanticism of war

  • Dealing with the Forbidden & How It Begins

    I've a talent for throwing things away.

  • The Science of Departures

    We study the departure screen and

  • Sara Wainscott’s “Insecurity System” reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar

    Sara Wainscott Insecurity System 2020 Persea Books $15.95, paperback, 78 pages. Reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar                 Insecurity System,…

    Book Review

  • Reginald Dwayne Betts: On Art, Poetry, the Particular Fucked Up Parts of Incarceration, and the Multitudes of I — Interview by Amanda Newell

    I had the pleasure of interviewing Reginald Dwayne Betts in a conversation that ranged from poetry, race, and erasure to…

    Featured Selection

  • Hapax Legomenon

    Literally “thing said once,

  • Williams, Springer, Revell et. al.

    Derek JG Williams On “Prizefighting”: Boxing’s an easy metaphor for writers, and writing. It appeals to the drama of our…

    Editors Note

  • Prizefighting

    $25 Cleaning Fee

  • On The Calculation of Chances

    It takes more than faith

  • Rescuing Ourselves by Celia Bland

    I have been touring the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, via an online iPhone film.
    Essays and Comment

  • Flight, Ours & A Burn So Bad It Requires Ice

    We’re in bad, we’re in terrible, shape

  • Ghazal with Bread

    how many summers apart from you, in search of bread

  • The Irretrievable

    Second shelf on the right. You’ll

  • After the Fire Items # 6-10, Living Room

    Mom said ‘Take them for the gold & don’t pay off my credit card debt,

  • Before Things Got Bad

    After the mayor closed all the parks

  • Edinburgh University Anatomical Collection

    Take shelter awhile from mortality

  • Poetry

    In my new room upstairs,

  • Boy in a Hole

    The boy meant to help his father

  • FOR MATS AND LAILA

    The Date Line lies motionless between Samoa and Tonga, but the Midnight Line glides across the ocean and islands and rooftops of huts.

  • Paramouria & You Do What You’re Good At

    You know (you think), and then

  • Like Warm Ice Cubes

    A father is like warm

  • Miho Nonaka’s “The Museum of Small Bones” reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar

    Miho Nonaka The Museum of Small Bones. “2020” Ashland Poetry Press. $19.95, paperback. 82 pages. Reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar  …

    Book Review

  • “Getting Stabbed Kinda Takes the Fight Out of Ya” by David Kirby

    This month’s essay on voice by David Kirby emanates the confidence and tone of an accomplished poet who is also…

    Essays and Comment

  • The Look

    I’ll never tell Ethan I listen to him sing

  • Battle Hymn of the Republic

    God, could Kieran sing!—

  • On Delta Flight #2164 From JFK

    I'm headed home from a stint at Long Island's

  • Maria Dolores, Mother of Sorrows Quilts

    She sewed them from the old

  • Miss Lola Ridge (1873-1941)

    The fire of the world is running through me.

  • Debris

    I love those spirits

  • The Romantic Poets

    If anybody needs a head

  • To Be That Boy, to Be That Horse

    I’ve watched a shy horse

  • Yes

    Yes, all things of water and our days rounded with light, yes,

  • Meeting Shakespeare

    I met Shakespeare in a hotel room downtown.

  • I’ll Hang Around as Long as You Will Let Me

    John Prine is dead on TV in the season before trees bear peaches

  • Dear Creature

    Because of what I did

  • Strength

    After the storm

  • A Prayer

    Praise the scent of wood

  • DINNER AT LYNN AND LINDA’S WITH KEN AND JACK

    Dinner tonight with two married gay couples

  • Derealization

    I left my body in Barnes & Noble

  • Discoveries

    What I knew about

  • His Side

    Easy now to stand on a bluff and see

  • Ladder, Facts and Rungs—Dancing on the Train Tracks with Fleda Brown Interview by Nancy Mitchell

    NM:  These eight prose poems in “Treatises” speak with the authority of well-documented research and claim the same authority of…

    Featured Selection

  • The Unreturning, 2019

    Suddenly cops crushed black citizens, hurled

  • The One Crying in English Class

    From time to time, I still get angry

  • She Said She Saw Vowels

    underneath her birdfeeder

  • Visiting Gertrude Stein in Père-Lachaise

    Her stone is not the largest.

  • The Poetics of War: Three New Books on Armed Conflict and Armed Service reviewed by Mark Wagenaar

    The Poetics of War: Three New Books on Armed Conflict and Armed Service              …

    Book Review

  • Richey, Clark and Olsen et. al.

    Frances Richey on ‘Afterimage’: I wrote Afterimage last August after spending a cloudy afternoon at Lincoln Center with my dear friend, Michael…

    Editors Note

  • Christopher Salerno interviewed by Nancy Mitchell

    NM:  I’m struck by the shifts of perspective within these featured poems, including human to non-human— in “SPORTS NO ONE…

    Featured Selection

  • Moveable

    Swords drawn, Hem and his bronze friend

  • Afterimage

    Do you remember those Cornell shadow boxes we saw at some

  • “But They Have Dwindled,” Rethinking Wordsworth’s “Resolution And Independence” As A Modern Day Cautionary Tale by Chard DeNiord

    In one of his most profound existential poems, “Resolution and Independence
    Essays and Comment

  • Deciduous (Evening in a Polar Vortex)

    Blanket, you hear, means to cover,

  • A FLOW STONE IN CO. CLARE

    You want to fathom me,

  • Wuhan

    Utopia, or dystopia,

  • Necromancy

    Squeeze the shadow.

  • Essay with a Grain of Salt

    Salt on black silk

  • It’s 3 A.M., Winter, and Nine Miles from Truckee

    and nobody better than I to tell you about

  • St. Rose of Lima

    Lips weary with chapped hallelujahs,

  • The Stranger

    A quick call

  • ON SILVER SPOONS

    The Golliwog spoon, we called it, the handle shaped like a head with heavy-lidded eyes and a thick-

  • False Darkness

    I need the sun to be setting

  • Grand Marais Estuary, in Fog (after the painting by Stanley Krohmer)

    Color of ice, or heaps of snow, gray-blue, slate.

  • Guitar & Lantern

    The boy with prosthetic limbs is the flame

  • In the Golden Silence of Vineyards & My Wine translated by Paula Bohince

    In the golden silence of vineyards,

  • Post-

    Clenching, unclenching her thin white fingers,

  • The Merchants of Venice

    The man speaks some Italian, the woman

  • Chelsea Wagenaar reviews Paisley Rekdal’s “Nightingale”

    In the opening poem of Nightingale, Paisley Rekdal writes, “The tree traffics / in a singular astonishment, its gold tongues…

    Book Review

  • Flash Essays by Alfred Corn

    Most of us have read Joyce’s Dubliners, which includes the story “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” but do we know what Ivy Day is in Ireland?
    Essays and Comment

  • My Polish and Another Poem

    When I try to thank it, it shushes me. Then illuminates my way to the Exit.

  • Family Once Removed and Who Cooks for You?

    I like to be alone

  • 5 Under 35 Plus

    5 under 35 Plus    JN It is with deep honor I introduce the second installment of this feature. Below…

    Featured Selection

  • Untitled

    But here in the city there are signs and crowds in the street

  • Henry, Waldrep, Harrison, et. al.

    DeWitt Henry regarding ‘On Shadows’: I’ve been writing in the DMZ between lyrical essays and poems for the past few…

    Editors Note

  • By the Numbers

    The number of times intuition told me I had dodge

  • Regular Arithmetic

    My sister says, all men are insecure,

  • Morning Hunger

    Why not in the icy clarity of morning,

  • Cold Front Coming

    A crescent moon

  • HOW IT IS WITH THE MEEK

    They are pulverized into earth

  • Scene from a Photograph in a Dream

    What was I doing in my childhood room again?

  • Mari Küla and Mari Meli

    Manuela Colipe Benavente breathes in the sun so that she can sleep.

  • Invocation

    I would like beamed to me from the Muse's tower high atop Parnassus

  • Wordwell Triptych

    chronic lapse

  • On Shadows & On Risk

    Me and my shadow

  • Essay on the Prose Poem by Charles Simic

    I’m grateful to Peter Johnson for bringing Charles Simic’s brilliant, unpublished “Essay on the Prose Poem” to my attention. Although…

    Essays and Comment

  • Mark Wagenaar reviews Mark Irwin’s “Shimmer”

    Mark Irwin’s Shimmer   Shimmer, the winner of the 2018 Phillip Levine Prize for Poetry, is Mark Irwin’s tenth volume of…

    Book Review

  • Signaling to You

    You live with a young leopard and a poem levitating in the gravitational landscape.

  • Engraved Phrases on Open Seas: Poems and Notes on Translations of Khal Torabully

    Engraved Phrases on Open Seas: Poems and Notes on Translations of Khal Torabully By Nancy Naomi Carlson   Few books…

    Featured Selection

  • Morris, Campo, Kolbe, et. al.

    Sawnie Morris on ‘Signaling to You’: “Signaling to You” began with a dream. I had no idea what the dream…

    Editors Note

  • July 4th

    Tarred roads starting to buckle,

  • AFTERNOON AT THE METROPOLITAN, NYC

    Against the mauve wall, a Flegel

  • Missed Romance & The Image

    An old black and white photograph

  • Ophthalmology

    No me miras, she said, hiding her face,

  • Fogetting Names

    Inevitable, and not

  • How Sad

    Their kisses were bitterly thin,

  • Bright in June Sun

    The young man, kneeling at his mother’s tomb, lays red tulips there,

  • Brothers

    Who eats with a jaw half-cranked with counterweight

  • Resumé

    Families shame you;

  • Timetable

    Somebody dies, for example, or is gone

  • Great Pond

    Tom swims

  • Other People’s Pain & Charade

    Remember her eating pad thai and grimacing

  • Four a.m. and 40 Years Later

    Driving into my old city yesterday

  • Reading and Writing Outside Thebes: In Praise of Syntax by Kimberly Johnson

    In 1939, at the queasy outset of the second World War, W. B. Yeats’s last published works appeared 
    Essays and Comment

  • On Poetry and the Necessity of Aimless Wandering: An interview with Alan Shapiro by Amanda Newell

    I had the pleasure of interviewing Alan Shapiro for this month’s feature, and we talked about everything from the prose…

    Featured Selection

  • Bakken, Kallet, Weaver, et. al.

    Christopher Bakken on “Goat Theology”   In the past few years, I’ve divided my summers between the islands of Crete…

    Editors Note

  • Chelsea Wagenaar reviews “View from Truth North” by Sara Henning

    In her wonderful little essay “The Bathroom,” Zadie Smith writes,
    Book Review

  • Soft Song

    Nothing about you is soft,

  • The Age of the Onion

    The onion is a Book of Revelations, diced to proverb-size.

  • Throughway and Passage

    Faces, facing one another on the bus.

  • In a Field, at Sunset

    When he asked if I still loved him, I didn’t answer

  • The Clacklet

    Buttons taken from a sewing box

  • Sunflower

    Relapse my maze

  • ANTIGONE CONSIDERS HER FAMILY: Father and Mother

    He was always unhappy—

  • Dark Enough

    I found her long black coat

  • December, First Frost

    A small green house sits beside the highway, darkening in maple shade.

  • Goat Theology

    Those who deny everything, yet want,

  • My Girl

    I was shopping for a castle.

  • Night Rising

    Silence falls in tiny waves, women shutting

  • Richard Greenfield reviews “NOS” by Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman

    GNOSIS OF OTHERWISE Up until 2013, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) listed a…

    Book Review

  • Plume Staff Choices

    (…which I really did almost call “Plume Plums”…)
    Featured Selection

  • Skin and Arioso

    I am sending off my blood for the story of who I am.

  • Svoboda, Lowe, Houlihan, et. al.

    Terese Svoboda on”Wrapped in Paper and String” I was thinking of how immigrants appear to so many brains as frightening…

    Editors Note

  • BLURRED LINES, SOME THOUGHTS ON HYBRID, LIMINAL, AND PROSE POETRY

    In his poem “In the Evening Air,” Theodor Roethke declares, “I’ll make a broken music or I’ll die.”
    Essays and Comment

  • Chocolate on my new pajamas

    Spun from a hundred cocoons

  • Wrapped in Paper and String

    Monsters crawl in our brains,

  • Clothes

    Because other things needed buying,

  • On Being Mused Upon

    Reading his poems, you recognize yourself

  • How It Is

    Say how it is

  • Edinburgh University Anatomical Collection

    Take shelter awhile from mortality

  • Heard in Claesz

    Decanting like the lees

  • Blind Trust

    In the nod of a cow as, stiff-legged,

  • Game with a Mad Bounce

    The child and I are kicking a pebble down the road--

  • DOMINION HELD AND ALTERED BY CHILDREN

    Feral children leave the inside screens

  • Outhouse with Maggots

    Look at us. Please. Do not run away.

  • Circumference & Earthrise

    Vanilla farmers in Madagascar sit in the dark with rifles;

  • We Lay Our Fear in a Wicker Basket

    Too drunk, walking around

  • Nathaniel Tarn reviews Joseph Donahue’s “Wind Maps I-VII”

    The poet Joseph Donahue is best known for his ongoing long work in several volumes
    Book Review

  • The Neural Lyre: An Interview with Richard Kenney by Amy Beeder

    The Neural Lyre: An Interview with Richard Kenney by Amy Beeder Reader, I present to you Richard Kenney’s elegant, sharp…

    Featured Selection

  • Silberblatt, Harrison, Armantrout, et. al.

    Neil Silberblatt on ‘Hagstrom’: As a result of several surgeries in 2016 – to remove cancerous tumors from my colon,…

    Editors Note

  • Winter Landscape with Bird Trap

    Only sparrows fly down, crows wait in treetops.

  • Late Elegy for Charlotte

    You were about to sail the Seine.

  • SUMMER UNDID ME: GUERLAIN IMPERIALE (BEDROOM), 1853

    Dear Reader, Fellow Perfume Testers and Collectors, Parfum Editors, Shunned Lovers Who Can No Longer Stand the
    Essays and Comment

  • The Definition of Postmodernism & If

    I was in David Lehman’s Modern Poetry class when I first heard the term “postmodernism.”

  • Transfer

    Now they tell us

  • Elegy

    The breeze this morning pulls on the surface of the bay

  • RETURN OF THE HERO

    So they brought in a bird for him,

  • The Orders of the Ordinary

    Death seemed no more

  • Hagstrom

    I examine my scarred torso

  • A Five-Years-Late Note to Jake Adam York

    In Chicago, where the light plows over the lake into convention

  • The Charter of Effects

    Counsel is a lawyer driven by money.

  • SCENE FROM A PHOTOGRAPH IN A DREAM

    What was I doing in my childhood room again?

  • Into the Flame

    And you lay for decades counting sheep

  • FENG SHUI & PARANOID X-RAY

    Listen: mute bells peal

  • Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, On Freud’s Birthday [May 5] & In Vienna

    The first movement of Tchaikovsky’s

  • John Tipton reviews Carsten René Nielsen’s “Forty-one Objects”

    On Saturday, April 26, 1952, Ulrich Balslev contacted the Museum of Prehistory in Aarhus
    Book Review

  • Daisy Fried: On Jesus, Uncertainty, Risk, and Imagination. Interview by Amanda Newell

    Daisy Fried: On Jesus, Uncertainty, Risk, and Imagination Interview by Amanda Newell   AN: On social media recently, you said…

    Featured Selection

  • The Deposition

    I get to school early, take down the crucifix.

  • On Ross Gay’s Likely Dispassion

    When is dispassion in a poem more passionate than heat?
    Essays and Comment

  • Black Apples & Landing

    Dropping to the red earth, these, the night bearing

  • Grae, Starzinger & Brehm, et. al.

    Tanya Grae on “The Path of Non-Attachment”:   A few months after Hurricane Andrew hit, some people began calling it…

    Editors Note

  • After Callimachus

    Goddess of parturition, listen when Cleo

  • Fallow Ground & Geometries of Exile (or)

    your washboard hands

  • Borges at Dolphin Books: New Orleans, 1982

    He props his cane between Maps & True Crime,

  • Milk Ice

    Driving through fog and storm’s aftermath

  • Government Center

    Screeching right up to us through downtown Friday traffic.

  • The Path of Non-Attachment

    Andrew totaled my car, leveled the house,

  • mother of stains

    a mother made of three buttons from three different sweaters

  • The House

    With stained red awnings

  • My Obituary

    Will it merit a full column in The Post or The Times

  • I Decided to Weigh My Head

    Was it really as heavy as it felt?

  • Failure, an Update

    The question is how long will she sit there

  • Lea Graham reviews Michael Anania’s “Nightsongs & Clamors”

    IT’S ABOUT TIME       This past June marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Michael Anania’s first…

    Book Review

  • Hailey Leithauser Interviewed by Amy Beeder

    Oh What Worms They Are: An Interview with Hailey Leithauser by Amy Beeder
    Featured Selection

  • Suspense, Suspension, and the Sublime in the Poetry of Robert Frost

    Suspense, Suspension, and the Sublime in the Poetry of Robert Frost     Robert Frost was a sublime poet who…

    Essays and Comment

  • No Selfies For Mary & Pater Noster

    In the mausoleum shadow, eye-mopping mother, O Mary,

  • Magical Thinking

    My dog does not question

  • The Human

    In the interim I will find a way to feel at home with the animal

  • Buckley, Friman & Barbarese et. al.

    Christopher Buckley on “Post-Structuralism” Well, my title is freighted with irony, of course . . . never a subscriber to…

    Editors Note

  • 3:14 PM

    This blue pen I am holding

  • Rain Sonnets

    When the bear finally arrives, he’s starving. He wants whatever’s in my little blue basket, the Tupperware and the

  • My Father Was a Honey Bee

    My father was a honey bee He buzzed and buzzed

  • What We Do with What We Are

    I did not get better.

  • So What

    My mind’s a ringing phone

  • UBI AMOR IBI OCULUS EST

    Flumes of the late night

  • I’ll Be Fine

    Give or take, without my books

  • Post Structuralism

    But the first idea was not to shape the clouds

  • Swan Song

    I admit. In the beginning

  • Divorce Party Bonfire

    As in a secret rite

  • Erin Lyndal Martin reviews Franny Choi’s “Soft Science”

    CONSCIOUSNESS RAISED “This is a test to determine if you have consciousness,” Franny Choi writes in Soft Science. Clearly referencing…

    Book Review

  • The Poet in a Streetcar & The Sunflower of Rio de Onor

    Suddenly with another year fallen away

  • The Reliable Stream: On A.R. Ammons’s The Complete Poems, V. 1 & 2, W.W. Norton 2017 by T.R. Hummer

    This essay introduces new readers of Ammons’ work to the metaphysical courage of his ceaseless, restless poems, while also providing…

    Essays and Comment

  • Code

    At last it's just me and the alphabet.

  • Jim Daniels interviewed by Amanda Newell

    Jim Daniels Interviewed by Amanda Newell   I was delighted to speak with Jim Daniels for this month’s issue about…

    Featured Selection

  • Jollimore, Newell, Cooley et. al.

    Troy Jollimore on ‘Synecdoche’: Roger Ebert once said that no great film is depressing; only bad films are depressing. I…

    Editors Note

  • Dawn Without Sun & Mist Gently Smothers Sight

    Dawn without sun

  • Synecdoche, New York

    When you meet

  • The Maker

    The maker never uses thread

  • Interrogations Update & Mythos

    When will I see you again? I’ve asked the priests.

  • The Dead, At Home,

    snag on brush and low cactus.

  • The Occupant Imagines the House as a Great Fish & Eight Things…

    It has already swallowed a century, each year a silver iridescent scale.  For eight, she has lived in its belly,

  • Masque

    Lamplight blue cushions

  • Testimony of an Armless Man

    I lost my arms in a farming accident, but later found I’d grown phantom limbs. There were many things I

  • DIEU! QU’IL LA FAIT & ON THE RIVERLINE

    Would it be cheating

  • Quotidian and Carry

    Steak dinners are the worst /you prefer the fatty cut / those white-ribboned slabs from Save-A-Lot

  • Joshua Corey reviews Katy Bohinc’s “Scorpio”

    Ralph Waldo Emerson described “the poet” as one who saw through appearances, and made that seeing-
    Book Review

  • The Big Blow

    After the snow-soused April gale I wandered

  • Joy

    Even when the gods have driven you

  • A Nun to be Named

    I’ve been thinking about the nun who wouldn’t let me pee in fifth grade.

  • Lea, Skloot, Pankey, et. al.

    Eric Pankey on ‘Melancholia’ and “Trouble in Mind’: These two prose poems, as with most the prose poems I have…

    Editors Note

  • Maurice Manning interviewed by Amanda Newell

    Maurice Manning: Railsplitter   I had the pleasure of speaking to Maurice Manning about his forthcoming collection, Railsplitter: Reflections on…

    Featured Selection

  • Walking into Metaphor

    A few weeks back, while snow persisted, no matter it was April, I headed into the woods, in part
    Essays and Comment

  • Three Ballerinas & Blue Plaques

    After the war, my father bought three little porcelain figurines in Germany, three

  • Interlude for a Solitary Flute

    What is the age of the couple

  • Western Spinebill Sighting and the Absence of Tim

    Tim is at a Goethe Society lesson

  • My Groundhog

    I had a groundhog in my back yard.

  • Polar Bear & Memento Mori: Stradivarius

    I am relieved. For twenty-seven years,

  • Elegy & Brooklyn, 1957

    My brother told me we would join the Wide

  • Melancholia & Trouble in Mind

    On the periodic table, it is the densest of elements. It does not refract or reflect, but absorbs all

  • Observatory at the Prison

    The day is warm, so we take chips and pop from the visitation-room vending machines to a

  • Book of Dolls

    The psychoanalyst has left the building

  • Salvation, in B#

    Bigtime Baltimore, new

  • Old Lithographed Landscape & Woolgathering

    A causeway wavers all the tilted days

  • Six Makeshift Trees Around My Bathtub

    Above our heads a vertical shadow

  • Joshua Corey reviews Amish Trivedi’s “Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed”

    E PLURIBUS UNUM Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed Amish Trivedi Shearsman Books $17 paperback, 84 pp. January 2019 Amish…

    Book Review

  • Excerpts from Little Goldie in America

    One more day, one more hour, play the good pig.

  • Amit Majmudar interviewed by Nancy Mitchell

      NM: In many of your online interviews, you’ve said something to the effect of when I want to tell…

    Featured Selection

  • Lehmann, Kenney, Withiam, et. al.

    Nin Andrews on ‘Soul Mate’: Years ago, I heard a speech by the late Tibetan lama, Gehlek Rimpoche (Allen Ginsberg’s…

    Editors Note

  • “The Prose Poem and the Problem of Genre”

    When it comes to deciding on whether a work of short prose is a prose poem, a flash fiction,
    Essays and Comment

  • Les Rochers de Belle-Ile [after the painting by Claude Monet]

    No beach here—just the sea

  • The Afterlife

    After life, pelicans glide above a shut- down bridge.

  • Madonna in Blue

    An aneurism in the sun, a gravity-wave.

  • Occupation

    As a peeper, some clear night, singing for a star,

  • Holiday Candle

    Thank you for your kind gift

  • Soul Mate

    When I was a girl, I had a dirty soul.

  • Barn Red

    Home alone, I swirl on scarlet lipstick and forget that I did,

  • Turd

    Twelve inches, specific as a nail,

  • Eight Poems

    An Amazon can be used for so much. The ashtray

  • Spit

    Some progress is anything but.

  • Electric Eyes of Night

    Three lanterns fill your window with deception.

  • Republic Cafe by David Biespiel reviewed by Craig Brandis

    Republic Café is David Biespiel’s sixth book of poetry. It is arguably his finest work. Loosely based on Alain Resnais’…

    Book Review

  • My Own Private Parthenon

    Before having met Linda Gregg
    Essays and Comment

  • Fidelity

    Heaven-selvage, twilight eyelet opened

  • But the Avant-Garde

    did find ways to wear TV as clothing--the monitors,

  • Culhane, Dow, Nazarene, et. al.

    Brian Culhane on “The Immortality Ode” Often, I turn to solo piano music for inspiration, with the great Bill Evans…

    Editors Note

  • Higher Education and In Every Scene

    It’s hard to solve the problems of the world

  • Alexandru (1904 – 1984)

    You cross the hill by wagon to Românești. Airplanes stretch ropes of milk in our way not unlike the wire you’d

  • Q&A for Keyhole and Mammogram Hair

    After my reading to high school students

  • The Immortality Ode

    Bill Evans is quiet, fingers still above the keys, But ready to begin again and

  • Don’t Know Much About the French I Took

    I silently disapproved when they said, “Let’s go French

  • Tampa at 8PM, Listening to a Podcast on Bird Migration

    Woodlawn Cemetery lies shadowed beneath violet-bellied clouds

  • Carpe Diem

    You won't live

  • After Reading Charles Wright I Turn Out the Light and Listen to the Rain

    Protestant American darkness

  • The Morgue is Closed & Pélican Dans Sa Píeté

    Any décor depresses when it shows

  • Charlotte

    That was a malaise. We call that malaise.

  • Not the Way it Was

    Today I overheard a conversation

  • The World Provides

    Someone somewhere must always be

  • Vanity

    it’s easy to fritter your life away

  • The Heart’s Emissary

    I’m pleased to introduce Doug Anderson as this month’s guest essayist. A veteran of the Vietnam War and now peace…

    Essays and Comment

  • Like by A.E. Stallings reviewed by Devin King

    LOST OBJECTS At the beginning of Book Two of Lucretius’ The Nature Of Things—Book One, you’ll remember, sets up that…

    Book Review

  • Clinton, Sholl, Aronson, et. al.

    Robert Clinton on “Caroline” The woman Caroline was entirely different from the woman described in the poem “Caroline,” except insofar…

    Editors Note

  • We Came This Way to Know the Evening

    Here’s a riddle:

  • Happy Hour

    I wasn’t supposed to touch the two glazed ceramic turtles

  • But-cept

    I recall not wanting my oldest son

  • Hogmanay, Edinburgh

    Past the iron fence on Princes Street

  • Maidendown

    The farm along the Maidendown,

  • Caroline

    One day they took him in a car all over the country and he

  • Prayer Written on a Wide Veranda on a Comfortable Couch in Sewanee, TN

    If prayer requires an audience that is divine

  • Blond for All the Boys

    Frank Ocean didn’t mean anything to me till Dave said check

  • A Flash of Lithe White Arms

    A flash of lithe white arms

  • Lost Leaders

    Some say that predatory sin was born of ignorance rather than

  • Rats

    Sudden underfoot, this one cries back

  • Hurdy Gurdy

    Like a grumbler who claims a five year old

  • Soldier’s Wife in the Aftermath

    After the great war I stepped inside

  • Sweet Tooth

    The man in the window is cheesecake;

  • The Old Thoughts

    Immersed, called forth—

  • Jeff Friedman interviewed by Nancy Mitchell

    It was like two different people battling for control of the same body.
    Featured Selection

  • Now That the Audience is Assembled by David Grubbs reviewed by Devin King

    VOCATION FOR LONGING
    Book Review

  • As the Land Listens

    Women are gathering on shore after shore after sharp rocked shore

  • Berdeshevsky, Schwartz, Lindsay, et. al.

    Margo Berdeshevsky, for AS THE LAND LISTENS : This is—the long distance call. I’ve been listening all my life. Days…

    Editors Note

  • Because What Else Could I Do

    I alone in a restaurant

  • How to Write on Rat Skin

    Decades ago, when personal computers were still a novelty just being embraced by writers among others, I fell into argument with a famous older poet.
    Essays and Comment

  • Dorianne Laux, interview by Hélène Cardona

    photo by John Campbell Dorianne Laux’s most recent collection Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected (W.W. Norton,…

    Featured Selection

  • Extreme Close-up

    All the things I love about his face come from movement:

  • Two Poems

    Thinking’s chariot starts with it:

  • Dolls

    The dolls wait for the children  

  • GOD HOUR (ERIC LUNDQUIST: IN MEMORIAM)

    No mind, no form, I only exist;

  • My Shame & Sanctuary

    At first that howl suggests an overbearing parent

  • The Authentic Galleries

    Begin again.  Begin with the wound.

  • Golgotha & Receiving the Host

    Then they came and cleansed you my love

  • The Palm Reader & Fire Horse

    These blithe lines

  • Molt & Clean Water Act

    Neither here nor there, you don’t fit. 

  • LIKE

    No other sound like it.

  • Murder Ballad & A Story of Teeth

    Georg Wilhelm Steller married his sea cow in a simple  ceremony  on a Bering  Island  beach.

  • The Other by Chard DeNiord

    THE OTHER In his great book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake records some of his wisest lines…

    Essays and Comment

  • DeNiord, Donnelly, McPherson, et. al.

    Chard DeNiord on ‘The Other’ As a great admirer of Walt Whitman’s use of his transpersonal self—that “I” that is…

    Editors Note

  • from In the Fires of Absence

    Beautiful gelid just-

  • Stephanie Burt

    One thing that excites me most about Advice from the Lights is the wide range of subjects and voices.
    Featured Selection

  • Trás-Os-Montes

    Tiny and bent over

  • On Beauty and To the Phaistos Disc

    I have a tree outside my house. I don’t know what kind—in spring, it blooms, gorgeous.

  • The Loneliness of His Death

    I like to think there’s a place where all the poets go

  • Callas Poems

    She whom you seek is not here!

  • Unshored Fragments: Dimitris Lyacos’ Post-Tragic Trilogy reviewed by Ilias Bistolas

    As long as a match stays alight.
    Book Review

  • In a Valley & Theorems of Reason

    Hello to the theorems of reason, hidden

  • Archaic Rayon Kamehameha

    Blue eyes like dusty Santa Rosa plums,

  • A Catalogue

    You wrote me a letter in a very fast hand

  • EASTHAM TURNIPS, ROUTE 6, NOVEMBER

    Honor System, the sign tacked to a scrub oak said,

  • Three More Claims to Fame

    Claim to Fame #7 :  Early Boyfriend

  • Sunday in Connecticut

    I drive into town.

  • The Last Few Feet

    And so the thyme fell and spilled a neat pile

  • Sherrard, Buckley, Collins, et. al.

    “Wild Yeast” and “Kiss and Tell” are both from my manuscript-in-progress,
    Editors Note

  • 5 under 35

    I am honored to introduce these remarkable works by supremely talented young poets.
    Featured Selection

  • Dredgings by Alexander Dickow

    Dredgings Alexander Dickow Why not mix languages, like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha or Jody Pou? French and English are to…

    Essays and Comment

  • Mark Scroggins’ “Pressure Dressing”, reviewed by Joshua Corey

    What do you want? What would make you happier?
    Book Review

  • Trespass and Dante Confidential

    That is not your poem to write, she says.

  • Amusements

    These are the long days that fill with night

  • Going Out Staying In

    I’ve done the math of staying in bed,

  • Market Day

    Python belt on my jeans.

  • Notes on Desire

    Archytas of Tarentum said the most fatal curse

  • Invitation to the Dance and Pieces of us Keep Breaking Off

    In the summer of 1949, Jacques d’Amboise found himself in a clash with a bully

  • A Convalescent Bed in a Field of Yellow Tulips

    Your wires trail into a gopher hole.

  • Kennedy

    Based on the private messages I receive

  • Burial Arrangements

    If I have to be buried at all,

  • Wild Yeast & Kiss and Tell

    What color is Shakespeare?

  • Here & Now

    I’m walking the beach where I ran as a child.

  • JIGSAW

    Where in the world does it fit

  • Disseminate

    Plums to the Garden of Eden. Their flesh

  • Pastan, Meinke, Dickow, et. al.

    Hank Lazer  on N33P14 and N33P29 The two poems/pages included in Plume 88 are from my ongoing Notebooks project –…

    Editors Note

  • Mystery and Surprise: Two Chinese Poets; reviewed by Alexander Dickow

    The contemporary Chinese poet Mang Ke and the Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin (9th century) could hardly be more different.…

    Book Review

  • Bhisham Bherwani: KNOTS

    No bowline, no double Carrick bend,
    Featured Selection

  • Can Poetry Save America by Chard DeNiord

    CAN POETRY SAVE AMERICA? Czelaw Milosz, the twentieth century Polish poet and Nobel laureate who became a U.S. citizen in…

    Essays and Comment

  • My Surly Heart

    You don’t know what lives

  • In Memorium: Peter Everwine — 1930 – 2018: written by Christopher Buckley

    In Memorium: Peter Everwine — 1930 – 2018 Peter Everwine died in his home in Fresno, CA during the night…

    Essays and Comment

  • N33P14 and N33P29

    Cloud cover

  • Cicada’s Courtship, Origin Story and Clean Houses

    The dissipation of freshly harvested leeks, wilted,

  • Clytemnestra, Unleashed

    Lovingly, she poured the scented water into his bath

  • The Sailor’s Love Song and Irish Whiskey

    When I was young I burned to be

  • Kabuki

    A widow in Mississippi kept them in glass cases,

  • Almost an Elegy: For Tony Hoagland

    Your poems make me want to write my poems

  • From Inches Away

    From inches away his finger can’t miss

  • From THIS BROKEN SYMMETRY

    Yes, Ravidat, to follow the rabbit down its winding hole

  • CYCLORAMA

    Only with such care could history take form.

  • Vesper

    The sky is blue for reasons other than atmospheric ones.

  • I Remember Nightfall: Marosa Di Giorgio, reviewed by Johannes Göransson

    Until recently, the great Uruguayan poet Marosa Di Giorgio (1932-2000) was largely untranslated.
    Book Review

  • That Which is Difficult: Poetry at West Point – Matt Salyer

    I was sitting on a corniche near the Tigris River watching kingfishers trip and scamper
    Essays and Comment

  • Gregerson, Jacob, Callihan, et. al.

    Linda Gregerson on “The Wayfarer” If one were to open the wooden panels on which this painting appears, one would…

    Editors Note

  • Frannie Lindsay

      Frannie Lindsay’s fifth volume, If Mercy, was released by The Word Works in 2016. Her work appears in Best…

    Featured Selection

  • Snow, an essay and The Day After the Day Without a Yesterday

    Or, the winter I kept being turned into a pillar of salt.

  • the primate hospital

    I have raptured the oars.

  • The Wayfarer

    When the wings of the triptych are open as

  • No Touch and Elder in a Garden

    I'm fed up with farewells.

  • Canine Elegy

    All over town, dogs are lying down

  • Pensé Que Estabas Muerto

    but your deaths existed the nights you didn’t come home.