Claire Harris

Fuck poems

In extremis

M. NourbeSe Philip

Poems are bullshit unless they are / Teeth or trees or lemons piled / on a step.

… Fuck poems / And they are useful, would they shoot / come at you, love what you are …— Amiri Baraka

Poems are bullshit unless they are / Teeth or trees or lemons piled / on a step.

… Fuck poems / And they are useful, would they shoot / come at you, love what you are …— Amiri Baraka

handwritten portion of a note from M. NourbeSe Philip to Claire Harris, incl. the phrase "I cannot write"

Death's great black wing

'Mi say mi cyant believe it'

M. NourbeSe Philip

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death’s great black wing scraped the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?
— Anna Akhmatova

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

Please buy the book directly from the publisher, University of Chicago Press, or a local bookstore, including Bridge Street Books, SemCoop, Talking Leaves, Indiebound, McNally-Jackson, and Bookshop.Org.

176 pages, paper and ebook. Audiobook is from Chicago and Amazon/Aubible.

Teaching Is Listening

on teaching poetry for Guanzhou University

Charles Bernstein

I made this short video for a conference on teaching English language poetry, sponsored by Guangzhou University, July 2, 2022. Li Zhimin has created an online course, partly based on Al Filreis's ModPo. This meeting is an extension of that course. In the video, I mention the Poem Profiler and Wreading Experiments; for more on this topic, see Attack of the Difficult Poems.

Lyric shard as grief's material

A review of Diana Khoi Nguyen's 'Ghost Of'

Kelly Hoffer

Part archive, part elegy, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection of poetry, Ghost Of, presents the haunting portrait of a grieving family set against a backdrop of intergenerational trauma. Written four years after the poet’s brother took his own life, Nguyen’s poems register this loss as it is refracted through the story of her parents’ immigration to the US as refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War.