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Poetry

Claudia Emerson and the Natural World

December 8, 2014

Though she received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for a collection of deeply personal poems, one of Claudia Emerson’s finest gifts was for inhabiting the voices of others, creating essentially a Spoon River Anthology for rural Virginia.

Breaking Bad

Poetry is broken language. Even in its “prose” incarnations—proems, prose poems—when lineation is not formally observed, poetry works the break. It interrupts, truncates, burglarizes. Poetry ruptures and ameliorates.

Last City

June 25, 2014

Perhaps it is the matter of going outwhich bothers me. That you or I or someone we know will have to get up,wearing only the warmth of the memory of our clothes, and find an airy socketin the car-fumed street. They say it is possible, for those wh [...]

Elegy

Gathered in the yard, shed-side, pokeweed, 
black walnut, pecan tree all leafed and 
umbrellaing. My grandmother, the relatives

Election Day

No one picked in the fields on Election Day. 
The trucks drove us to a picnic on the Bluff. 
The children sang songs like it was Sunday. 

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