BOSTON REVIEW

  A flourishing democracy depends on engaged public discussion of ideas that matter. Boston Review - independent and nonprofit - creates that discussion in print and on the Web, on tablets and in books, and at public events.

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Maybe I’m like a wedding, I have a formal need to make these two ideas meet, the colors of each one meeting, as if in a vineyard they are to be made better by each other. I’m not like a vineyard. The last time I started out with an idea I looked out across the water until the idea chimneyed up out of me and away. That’s how I know it feels good to give yourself up over something blue.

Laura Eve Engel, from “Something Blue”

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Goodbye to war? A scholar once said that war makes us rhyme           with each other. And music is the fluttering trash in the collage or painting or whatever           we want to call it. It is under glass so I place my face up against the reflection and wait for it to pull me inside.

Adam Clay, from “Goodbye to All That, the Birds Included”

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When wolves converge on prisons, when bats cover solar panels crashing power grids, a safari guide, a scientist with a troubled past, and a secret agent must concentrate to solve problems.

Rae Armantrout, from “Mother”

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In “Queers Against Hate”, Michael Bronski argues that if gay liberation hadn't happened—with its impractical desire to upend society—then the gay rights movement would never have won its more reasonable and carefully chosen legal battles.

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“She reports that she has begun to see each poem not as an “isolated event” but as part of “really all one long poem anyway” as “they go on into each other or over lap.””

In “One Long Poem”, Heather Treseler explores the intimate connection between poet and psychiatrist that is embodied in Elizabeth Bishop’s letters.

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The detective is the new mime. She acts out understanding the way a mime climbs an invisible wall.

Rae Armantrout, from “Conclusion”

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When shall we meet and stay close? Love is hard, tonight, this moment. Entering the gate of yearning, I came to know its bitterness. Yearning, if long, is a long memory— even when short, it’s still without end.

Li Bai, translated by Liang Yujing and Julian Farmer, “Autumn Wind”

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Once, in the heartland of us, we swam in a lake leaving everything we owned in a car. Nothing is simple.

Jennifer Kronovet, “KY”

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“But like so many American institutions, debt forgiveness—and the social mobility it enabled—applied almost exclusively to native-born white men. Nonwhite populations faced land divestment, chattel slavery, and disproportionate incarceration, followed by a subsequent regime of debt peonage and forced labor.” Read the full essay.

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I can’t have another baby, I explain—and then all the women I’ll never be line up beside me,  aproned, wedding-dressed, tattooed. With immersion blenders, apple corers, electric frying pans. Also called Île Flottante. In Serbia: En Senockle. And under the milk skin is a baby, a baby I could pick up, hold, swallow, my Thumbelina, my sweet homunculus, who floats inside me like a piece of half chewed gum, like a drifting torn nylon used to stuff a girls mouth shut.

Nicole Cooley, “Floating Island”

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How do I make you happy when we are half born to fail and half to run wild through an unholy earth? I carry you more and more. One thing is kind to another thing when both things are wounded.

Kimberly Grey, from “The First Marriage”

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Our loved world would love to be happy, would be happy to love the smut, the sage. Then a man dies quiet and another dies loud, a boy lies dead for more than four hours. The world is not afraid to watch, is full of carpeted reasons to wait.

Eileen G’Sell, from “The World”

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Lately I’ve been considering            the gratuitous loveliness of scalding water loosening food from plates,            how water can soften almost anything with time, and how, really, when it comes down to it,            the only pain most of us care about is our own.

Elizabeth Whittlesey, from “Vignettes Urbanes”

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Did I tell you the cops wrote “superficial cuts” in their report?          They didn’t understand when I said I needed something red. They didn’t understand when I said           I needed to paint my chest vermillion.

b: william bearhart, Psych Ward Visitation Hour

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God gives you bloodstream, bones, and loneliness. He extracts impurities lingering in the soul. I am first and foremost a scientist, God explains to you, heavy-hearted, and with primitive tools.

J. Estanislao Lopez, “The Maker”

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“The poetry of b: william bearhart teaches me something about my easy-to-hurt heart and this unreasonable world. When I read his poems, I feel: Yes, pain, and also love. The native body, like any brown body, deserves to be loved, is capable of loving, has in it the capacity for tenderness, desire, and pleasure in a way that literature has often denied it.” Read b: william bearhart’s poet’s sampler.

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What my father could not give my mother she gave to herself. I wanted to be like that; like the lawnmower, commanding respect, a steady echo. Instead I was more like the grass, in love with being severed, and later, with finding those parts of myself that had been buried, thin blades only the fresh spring rain had the power to recover.

Catherine Pond, from “I’m a Young Cowboy and Know I’ve Done Wrong”