Tag Archives: power of language

Airing the Cultural Laundry: Laura Baxter’s “Take Care of Your Soul—It’s Flapping in the Breeze”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 32/82: Laura Nielson Baxter, “Take Care of Your Soul—It’s Flapping in the Breeze“ “Take Care” is an exercise in absurdity. I mean, a neighbor airing his soul on a clothesline like recently washed laundry then leaving it to dry for a few decades? How absurd! But this premise hasn’t been pushed to absurdity just for absurdity’s sake. This… Read more »

On Serrano’s Piss Christ and the Work of Mormon Poetics

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Anthology Poet Highlight 31/82: Tyler Chadwick, “Submerged: Two Variations on Serrano’s Piss Christ“ (on page 72) The central method of gaining knowledge we have is our language. I do not think it is the function of the poets to give us little homilies in it, but to try to work the language to the limits of its resources, because when… Read more »

“Lingua Doctrinae“: Arwen Taylor’s Linguistic Worship

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Anthology Poet Highlight 27/82: Arwen Taylor, “Lingua Doctrinae“ amicus, amici, amico, amicum, amico, Amice. The window, with its morning salty joke of squinting scowls, unfolds a dusty yellow ray of light on you, while I still close-eyed soak in shadows in the middle of the room. We resurrect the third declension, bring the plural genitive alive, resume linguistic worship, conjugate… Read more »

E.S. Jenkins’ “Weary”: Sorrow, Greatly Multiplied

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Anthology Poet Highlight 25/82: E.S. (Sarah) Jenkins, “Weary” I counted them as they came—sons and daughters who didn’t count. I counted their limbs, perfect limbs, like their father’s— nothing so imperfect. I found him perfect, my one week of us, my one weak husband. In her moving elegiac poem, “Weary,” Sarah highlights a less than pleasant aspect of the woman’s… Read more »

Sally Stratford’s “Inheritance”: What Holds Us Together

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Anthology Poet Highlight 17/82: Sally Stratford, “Inheritance“ The most striking thing to me about this poem are the images that suggest being clothed/covered/dressed in one’s legacy; or, in the poet’s words, that imply “wear[ing a] name” (line 1) that’s been passed between generations. There’s the “two carat diamond / which, like a heavy rock of salt, / falls to the… Read more »

An “Evening Drive” through the Nature of Language with Patricia Karamesines

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Anthology Poet Highlight 16/82: Patricia Karamesines, “Evening Drive“ The lyric quality of “Evening Drive” pulls me into the narrative, placing me in the (rhetorical) vehicle beside the poet and her companion as they drive down a springing lane, both traversing the same landscape, through seeing it through different eyes. Such is the nature of language—and the language of nature, for… Read more »

“A Delicious Lapping”: Lance Larsen’s In All Their Animal Brilliance

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Anthology Poet Highlight 15/82: Lance Larsen, In All Their Animal Brilliance American poet Lola Haskins blurbed about Lance’s second collection that “the book stands out” in the field of contemporary American poetry for at least two reasons: first, because “it travels—from a talisman in the first poem to a vineyard in the last, in which metaphors of growth and renewal… Read more »

Kimberly Johnson’s Ode To a Woman’s “Most Matronly Adornment”

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Poet Highlight: Kimberly Johnson, “Ode on My Episiotomy“ Yep. That’s right. Episiotomy. A woman’s “most matronly adornment,” as Kim has it. What better reason, then, to write an “Ode on My Episiotomy.” (Not that I have one—not that I’ll ever have one, unless, like I ruminate here, I can slip on my wife’s. Not likely though.) I adore this poem—as… Read more »

Warren Hatch’s Mapping the Bones of the World: “An Economy of Grace”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 13/82: Warren (Scott) Hatch, Mapping the Bones of the World Although it might seem contradictory to suggest that Mapping the Bones of the World, a collection of long narrative poems, is economical—as if the poet had composed from a frugal rhetorical budget, determined to compress experience into as tight a linguistic vessel as he could craft in… Read more »

Breaking Bread with Laraine Wilkins: “Make Yourself at Home”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 12/82: Laraine Wilkins: “Make Yourself at Home“ (scroll down)   While Laraine Wilkins has passed on and while I never knew her (though we did share a few brief emails when she was editor of Irreantum: A Review of Mormon Literature and Film and I’d submitted some poems for publication), I believe her impact on the world… Read more »