David Buuck

Might what makes for better poems be made up for grabs, as a result of, or in response to, what might happen outside the poems, despite them, and not from afterthought or in language only

David Mura

Best, the best, the best second grade vocabulary. A liar. Yugest liar. Can’t believe the lies. Crow Cro-Magnon lies”

Adrian C.  Louis

But America itself has always been a monster. We like to pretend we can’t see that & keep our monstrous nature hidden like a sasquatch in the deepest, dank forest. Now, since the election, small monsters strut upon our sidewalks in broad daylight & all I can do is shake my withered head & join them from time to time

Claudia Rankine

Now looking back I might have handled discussions touching on white abolitionists and civil rights activists differently, but in the moment I was bemused that the student wished me to turn my attention away from the problems of systemic white dominance in order to create a more palatable narrative for her

Tisa Bryant

That’s the thing that makes Get Out truly terrifying: that present absence that is us, our representation and functionality, in a narrative perpetually written and controlled by white people

Raúl Zurita

Thus abandoned to the final spasm of language we lift up blind worlds, empty scenarios and parodies of fullness. What is at stake is not our survival but the possibility of rebirth. Because yes, one can survive death

Ilya Kaminsky

Jorie Graham

The lovers // are taking their time I think. The storm appears above the woods like a radio / left on in an abandoned car. Are they apologizing now, again, to the earth, / are they wishing they could stop and hide ­­– let’s be the lucky ones that don't / go out again – are they standing terrified in their Jerusalem of knowing things, of / things . . .

Alain Borer

We cannot understand Rimbaud’s renunciations (although quite close to his initiatives) if we don't integrate velocity as a structural given, an idiorhythmia: it’s somewhat false to say that Rimbaud abandons poetry: he constantly abandons all his collections of poetry along with their proposed direction, at one time or other in the process, as if he were already anticipating the end, hurrying to do better elsewhere.

Ilse Achinger

Now give me back my willow trees. Smooth down your own fur, give me the willow trees. And take a rest, take a long rest. I will stay close to the edge. I want nothing of the current – except to be spared by it. The middle – gold, red-gold, black-gold. Spared until I’m no longer spared. Give me that

David Lau

Alain Badiou recently wrote that there is a kind of curfew for any discussion of the revolts and revolutions of the heroic 20th century. We need to break that curfew on discussions of the L.A. riots today. To get beyond the frozen racism of the corporate media’s “race relations” discourse, we need movements like Black Lives Matter or the militant wing of the immigrant rights movement – a movement creates new discourse and analysis”

Calvin Bedient

An Armantrout poem produces the void over and over again. That is its originality, its modernity, and above all its interest. This void is the positive of a rejection (never mind the unattainability) of system, even the literary industry of resonance