Reverse Suicide by Matt Rasmussen

Matt Rasmussen has written a poem that will stop your breath. Reverse Suicide is a simple yet powerful poem that ends in the most haunting way. The out of order telling adds to the weight of this poem. Events go from negative to unsettling to brutal to hollow to mournful, until we end up alone in the yard with the narrator and his bother wanting to watch the leaves fall back up into the trees.

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The Miscarriage: A Silent Film by Douglas Kearney

If you have never heard a poem without reading it aloud, then let me introduce you to Douglas Kearney’s poetry in his book Patter. Kearney delivers performative, typographical poems that remind me of the 1980’s American neo-conceptual artist Jenny Holzer (man, if these two could meet and do a project…). Jenny Holzer brought word art to the streets and Douglas Kearney brought a bit of street art to poetry. Inside Kearney’s book, Patter, poetry exists not only as words but as a visual medium in the form of street art, a screenplay, a wordfind and a sonnet interrupted by graffiti. On the surface, his poems are pleasing to the reader’s eye: they are deep and compact, yet lively. There are so many layers in Kearney’s poems; each unwinds a narrative in an overlying structure of wordplay and some with graphics.

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The First Day I Un-Loved You by Kris Bigalk

Kris Bigalk’s poem The First Day I Un-Loved You is all about awakening.

Awakenings can make us feel like our current life is being ripped away and being pieced back together simultaneously. It feels like being caught between this person we are for someone else, the person we actually are, and the mess of a person we are right now. Therefore, yeah who needs clothes, who needs to shave, do not even make a waxing appointment and yes, Doritos are sustenance.

Awakenings help us to recognize all the ways we make ourselves fit into other people’s rules, margins, and packaging. Is there room on that couch Kris? Let’s sit here and go numb and after that, we can take that purple dress to a second hand store.

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To Make Baking Powder Biscuits by KateLynn Hibbard

One of the most famous villanelle poem’s is Dylan Thomas’ Do not go gentle into that good night, with the repeated lines “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” A contemporary take on the villanelle form is KateLynn Hibbard’s poem To Make Baking Powder, with its fire-related words stove, burn, stoke, hungry baking up some subtle feminist rage, felt by a subservient wife of the settler colonial era in midwest America, when gender role restrictions limited women’s opportunities and choices.

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