#bostonreview

[deadpoetsmusings]

The Country Without a Post Office

As news leaks of India’s forced communications blackout in Kashmir, the work of poet Agha Shahid Ali is tragically timely—both its depiction of Kashmiri suffering and the poet’s attempt to imagine a better future for his home.

“When will you come home?” Father asks, then asks again. The ocean moves into the wires. I shout, “Are you all happy?” The line goes dead. The waters leave the wires.  The sea is quiet, and over it  the cold, full moon of Kashmir.”

I’m currently making my way (excruciatingly slowly) through all of Agha Sahid Ali’s poetry and in context of the Indian occupation of Kashmir and its communication blockade of the region, this tugs at my heartstrings. 

[willywp]

I love that printed magazines exist but the feeling and flavor has changed. Models who aren’t super skinny, feminism reappropriating negative words, and questioning corporate America have all gone mainstream. #bitchmagazine #peppermintmagazine #bostonreview #print #magazines #newyork #newyorkcity #nyc #ny (at Midtown East) https://www.instagram.com/p/BxiajEVlJsV/?igshid=1l7j80z86ywlj

[omnidawn]

Monday keeps getting better! Check out “autochthonous: or, so goes the logic” by José Felipe Alvergue, author of ‘precis’ (Omnidawn 2017), in the @bostonreview. Link and bio below. / “The crisis of change and human impact exposes actuarial typification. A problem. A tide. A storm. An invasive species of thought, description, and body. Is the democratic paradox itself––to care from a universal necessity” / josé felipe alvergue was born in San Salvador, El Salvador, and grew up on the Mexico/US border. He is a graduate of both the Buffalo Poetics and CalArts Writing programs. As a grain of the Central American diaspora he works between text, performance, and archive in mapping the transnationalisms that shape residential identity. josé also teaches transnational and contemporary literature in Wisconsin, and is the author of gist : rift : drift : bloom (Further Other Book Works, 2015). / http://bostonreview.net/poetry/alvergue-autochthony #poetry #bostonreview #omnidawn #litjournal #poets

[fourwaybooks]

Poem by Four Way Books Author J. Mae Barizo in "Boston Review"

"After J.S. Bach / Cello Suite No. 6, BWV 1012" by J. Mae Barizo (her poetry collection The Cumulus Effect is forthcoming from Four Way Books in Fall 2015) has been published in the Boston Review. 

[galagalactic]

so proud to know this brilliant mind.

[domenicahope]

I lay on the cream shag carpet with my brother and argue what a kobold is, and is not. I am nine. Behind the oblong dresser in the basement is a white stub of chalk with a wolf spider crouching on it. It does not know I am about to pick it up. When I am twenty-one, I clutch a cold ten dollar bill. The gas attendant has a gold tooth. Says, what are you all dressed up for, missy. I smooth the gray wool of my bridge coat. A bell chimes and my shoulder blades flinch. I cannot see the snowflakes melting into my cuffs. No eyes watch my body shuffle back to the car across the ice, no witnesses. Years later, a lover’s shadow traipses diagonally across the floor of the limehouse. He’s just told me he didn’t fall in love with me. The moon in splinters across stack piles of buildings. I open his refrigerator, gulp milk from a glass bottle. There is nothing left for me to do. My brother has been dead for nine years. A kobold: a kind of sprite with thin, ivy-colored arms. See, he is not here to dispute this. This is what I think when the lover asks why I am so quiet. My body shaped like a C at the foot of his bed. My fingers coiled in blankets. Thick and coconut white. I miss everything.

Regina DiPerna, "Where My Body Has Been" from The Boston Review

[strangemagnetism]

Salt Farm at Night 

dragging like dead men on the river

  darkness falls on the salt farm

  island shadows are carried on the wind

  soaked fish in water

  white snow fogging the surface

  through a scrapped vessel’s window, the reflection of the river’s darkness

  a stain seagulls left on the cabin floor

  water at night peeling off the scales of fish

  the collarbone of the clouds reflect the distant light of a house in mourning

  eyes come to see the ebbing tide blur the salt farm

and at night evaporate to white

  as a man placing a stone on his injured horse

  sinking it into the river and returning

  here is the landscape that wind might have painted

  spreading the white sound of water like words from the dead

  inside the sea without light, why don’t we call that sound the soul

  red doesn’t spread across the sky, red crosses underwater

  for many thousands of years watch the bitter light of the river rolling

  the water’s internal organs to see

- Kim Kyung Ju, trans, by Jake Levine + Jung Hi-Yeon 

[asbestosmeadow]