Watercolor in dream phoneme I hope this reaches you up like where.

the power is out all over Cleveland

How pitiful to be human

Where is upstate? A proximity, a region positioned degrees away from somewhere not upstate, forever elsewhere.

Comics show eyes, minds, people where to go, how to organize spatial information, what’s important, what to see. Photographs don’t, or not in the same way: maps do.

He emphasizes the way that content prophesies form, or the way that form supervenes upon content—which is to say, he emphasizes the way in which the void leaps and sticks its landing.

Watch Your Language shadows So to Speak, offering what the poems can’t—not explanations of the origins of lyric impulse, but a recreation of the process involved in coaxing it.

The desire to flay and spread open the guts, to commit sin and confess it, to claim responsibility by way of observational learning.

When you grow up alongside a writer and see them change and rearrange and deliver a new object still dripping sweat, that object looks different than if you were merely recovering it from the long march of literature by the no-longer living.

You thought you knew everything about couplets, and then realize there’s something new to discover in the familiar form. An uncovering of fossils, a tomb whose bones are still intact, jewelry in place and shining around the dusty vertebrae.

Darras’ poetry may long for the alleged poetic horizon from which waves—and, indeed, shades—emanate but, in its subtle (if finless) wisdom, remains coastal, content to let lyric fall tame upon the sand.

What may seem at odds—Rilke and exilic Afghan selfhood, the DMAT and exilic Iranian selfhood—is connected and made whole. All become one in a language where poets imagine impossible homes for their fractured selves.

as melt, magnolia, test cricket, and breath

manta, sway, Cairngorms, slow spinning

The function of repetition, of questions being asked toward impossibility, is to create the conditions by which prayer becomes a conceivable way of engaging with the world.

Mullen hands us this unsellable product of the Diary Industry as if it were what we’d always wanted—a project book stripped of recognizable content by the very process of that projection. It’s genre-ending.

paper cranes on the mantel hampered
by symbolic nature but why not
be more is it justice to want and want

Like a smothering deformative blight, these poems arrive in remission, the moment before full collapse, a slipstream incongruity between locations, futurities, and the clouded cataracts of speculation.

Poetry is, or should be, a kind of thinking; it’s nothingness’s kingdom, where everything is possible. I use poetry to find out what I think.

You make up
the better part
of an expression

to What are you susceptible by description

the there there, when it repeats