May 7
- Andrew Durbin, from Mature Themes
seen from Brazil
seen from Malaysia
seen from Yemen
seen from United States
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seen from China
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seen from Argentina
seen from Switzerland
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- Andrew Durbin, from Mature Themes
“Lebensraum,” which refers to the German idea of “living space,” is a colonial concept akin to manifest destiny that was adapted to serve Nazism’s genocidal vision. The notion of Lebensraum links family comfort with genocide and settler colonialism, but it also euphemizes those connections and naturalizes the state’s insidious agenda through the practice of domesticity.
- Sari Edelstein, The Sentimentality of Evil.
I do talk about this simultaneity in a variety of poems within the collection. In the poem “Buffalograss,” I talk about the Diné word for eye hardening into the word for war. I learned this from my father after he was talking with me about the word anaa’ and how it can be translated into eye or war. He said your eye becomes a shield against the evils that we see in our lives. I then asked the question about desire and imagined a speaker seeing a man naked for the first time. Is his eye-shield protecting him from this? What about this desire turns into war? What needs saving in this situation? The energies of war and desire swirl around this speaker and this man. The poem being in couplets only thickens this tension within this moment. This moment where desire can turn into destruction so easily because men desiring men is seen as evil, as wrong.
“He unlearns how to hold a fist / with my hand”: A Conversation with Jake Skeets
The two principal words in use in Latin were cutis, which signified the living skin, the skin that protects, that expresses and arouses and that is the subject of care and beautifying attention. Pellis, by contrast, is the dead, the flayed skin. It is the word used for animal skins, and evokes disgust, disgrace and horror. Once scoured away from the body, the human or animal skin becomes simply a hide, deader than a corpse, a corpse’s remnant, the corpse of a corpse.
- Steven Connor, The Book of Skin.
- Mark Wunderlich, Fragment of St. Julian.
The sixth image my father, dragged into the poem against his will again. I suspend him here with me. I revel in our togetherness. His nails join mine, our backs are cut, our eyes plucked out. The cruelty of jailers infected my language. Everything I love I turn to cruelty. The poem now is just another cell. All I know is how to write us hurt. Inside this image I reach out my little toe and touch the image of my father’s little toe. The state is crueler than your poem ever could be, I make the poem make my father say.
- Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, Craft Talk.
The first image, a little girl’s body pulled out of the rubble, I strike from the poem. Let her rest. Language is a failed state. The second image my own body stripped and hung by my fingers, deprived of their nails, piled neatly on a nearby table. This image I keep; the poem is a space to rehearse for the future.
- Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, Craft Talk.
and I, farthest away, choose a new name my grandmother cannot pray for. I have stolen language. nana cannot pronounce Charlie when she prays in Spanish. I love her and cannot decide not to, even when she prays wrong. transition and translation or transnational trauma hold hands. I know the power of naming things. I often wish I didn’t.
- Charlie Blodnieks, Ars poetica for the end of the world.