All posts filed under: New Series

Back issues and features from the New Series. (2005-present)

Adrienne Raphel: “Confession”

Published by Staff

I wrote “Confession” in the winter, recently after I had moved from Iowa City to Cambridge, MA. I’d moved from a rambling attic apartment with secret unfinished rooms to a partially furnished attic studio with a shared bathroom down the hall. My writing space was the floor. The convent of San Marco in Florence, Italy contains small, individual cells, like a beehive, that monks would use for devotion. Each cell is bare save for a simple fresco by the early Renaissance master Fra Angelico. My room in Cambridge hardly had a monastic aesthetic; books and clothes were piled in geological strata. Every so often, I would find a bee feebly circling around the lampshade, or a couple of dead bees in the windowsill. “Confession” came to me after receiving a phone call very early in the morning from a friend whom I hadn’t spoken with in months. I don’t know why she chose that morning. She was in a difficult relationship, unhappy, isolated, yet surrounded by a city; I was feeling adrift and lonely, uncertain …

COREY VAN LANDINGHAM Epithalamium

Published by Staff

Because I’ve seen the way a body looks preserved, I turned away from you. That’s the most that I could do. Distance, dear, makes the heart grow weary. The scene where I’m your citizen, but am touching myself inside a stranger’s apartment as, in Yemen, an American drone kills 14 at a wedding, mistakenly. Mistakenly, I chose the hydrangea, whose large pink blush has been said to match the size of a sender’s heart. When not pruned properly, the flowers sag, begin to break. Once, you fed me heart on a skewer. After, I read the animal would be inside me forever, idea that made me sick for days. Now, my autoerotic display, while, in Yemen, vehicles still are smoking. Distance makes easy unmanning the hands. I hasten to compare the scene where I’m such a terror in that dress, where the flowers are all a mess, and I’m gussied up. I’m turned on by men I’ve never met. What a wedding photographer, as anyone poses candid for the drone. But, no, I’m only posing …

Robert Wrigley: Two Poems

Published by Staff

It may be that the only thing these two poems have in common is that they were written by the same poet, and that they were published in Poetry Northwest, one a quarter century or so ago, the other quite recently. “Dust” was written about the time I was, you might say, entering into the possibilities of rhyme (it was accepted, as many were in those days, by David Wagoner, to whom I offer my thanks); “Hanging Laundry On a Windy Day in Assisi,” was written in Italy this past May, and it suggests that those possibilities have stayed with me.  Rilke said, “Rhyme is a goddess of secret and ancient coincidences,” and that strikes me as one of the finest things anyone’s ever said about a poetic technique. Among other things, the first is about getting very dirty; the other is about the joy of clean laundry. But both are very much about the places in which they occur. I am, it has been pointed out, a “poet of place.” That’s not something I …

Now available: The Photography Issue

Published by Keetje Kuipers

Dear Readers, We’re pleased to report that the Spring-Summer special issue is now available– The Photography Issue— our biggest and best yet. It features poetry by Sierra Nelson, Troy Jollimore, Ellen Bass, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Francis McCue, Andrew Zawacki, and Nicky Beer, photography by Doug Keyes, Nance Van Winckel, Dianne Kornberg, and a special feature on the work of Mary Randlett, including rare photos of the last days of Theodore Roethke. There’s also a special section, Film Roll: An Expose in 24 Frames, curated with contributing editor Andrew Zawacki,  featuring a film roll’s worth of short takes on the intersections of poetry & photography, including pieces by C.D. Wright, Sharon Olds, John Yau, Paisley Rekdal, Joshua Edwards, Martha Ronk, Susan Wheeler, and many others. Throughout the issue, we examine and re-envision the intersections of poetry and photography, from the origins of the photograph to the state of the image in the digital age. Now’s the time to subscribe to ensure this special reaches you. And watch for more po-photographic inquiry in this space all summer long…