Poetry of Loss – Page 12 – As It Ought To Be

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: PAUL NEMSER

Posted on August 10, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

MEETING YOU AFTER CHERNOBYL
By Paul Nemser

The last frozen day had come and gone, and we were
sleeping in the elbows of trees in the elbow of a town,
our sutures all sunken together as if we shared one wound,
as if we had climbed from a single pit

like a race of dinosaurs grown from a fused lump of eggs
that had slept in valley ice for three shifts of the North Star,
as the leaves undecorated the last few branches
which were skinny as bat bones or the bones of a squirrel.

There were cattle blotched with waning alphabets.
And there were eyes that had seen too many lights,
so we didn’t recognize the wells
we had drunk from all our lives, nor

the creek that flowed with clothes and flesh,
nor the seeds brought from all over the countryside,
from knived sacks in waterlogged barns, from pods
trembling on grotesque grasses.

We talked to each other until we could not talk.
It was gobbledygook, was joy, nothing to remember:
We would not be overrun like ants by a larger horde of ants.
The darkness would not come closer.

A dog would lift its howl to where the wind left
the tablecloths—crumpled, clawed up, drying in the sun.
A phalanx of trucks that had jostled our vertebrae
would sound like bubbles in a bottle.

I never missed you so much as waking from that sleep.
And I dream of you now lingering barely below ground,
all your twenty fingers warbling together as on flutes.
My pores open to you as to rain.

Years give way to lakes of white dust, to unyielding dirt-land.
The snouts of oxen stain pale as marble
when the beasts haul blades through the hardness that remains
of what decades ago had been garden.

(Today’s poem originally appeared in AGNI, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Paul Nemser’s book, Taurus, chosen by Andrew Hudgins as winner of the 2011 New American Poetry Prize, will be published by New American Press in November, 2013. His chapbook, Tales of the Tetragrammaton, will be published by Mayapple Press in summer, 2014. Nemser’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Blackbird, Fulcrum, Per Contra, Raritan, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife Rebecca and practices law in Boston. Some of his family came from Chernobyl.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is one of those thoughtful, emotive, beautiful lyric poems that better expresses itself than I ever could. Some days the poems just speak for themselves. Are you listening?

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: AMANDA AUCHTER

Posted on July 13, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

THE PINK CHANEL SUIT
By Amanda Auchter

She said
don’t wash it, when asked

if she wanted to change, to take off

the wool skirt, the blue

lined jacket. I want them to see,

she said. Kid gloves, a blood bloom

on her wrist,
stockings. Swipe of hair

across her mouth.
In the car, she remembers

a scatter of yellow

roses, black birds rising
from the Live Oak. How the children

ran alongside as they drove past, waving.

The open windows. A man with a camera,

an umbrella
that opened. A raincoat. In the car,

her body covered with bone,

hair. The bright pink suit against the gray
November. And all that red inside her hands.

(Today’s poem originally appeared in Rattle , and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Amanda Auchter is the founding editor of Pebble Lake Review and the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the 2012 Perugia Press Award, and of The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and teaches creative writing and literature at Lone Star College. She is currently at work on a memoir about adoption and the foster care system, What Took You So Long.

Editor’s Note: There is a certain ease in the presentation of today’s subject matter that makes the devastation somehow more powerful. A softness in the notion of “The bright pink suit against the gray / November” that at once heightens and dulls the impact of the poem’s final blow. It is as if the poem is a grenade exploding flowers.

Want to read more by and about Amanda Auchter?
Author Website
Author Blog
Pebble Lake Review

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LYTTON BELL

Posted on June 29, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

Photo by Robert Sanders

JANE’S HEARTBREAK YARD SALE
By Lytton Bell

Who sells used sex toys at a garage sale?
I knew I had to pull over
as soon as I saw that table full of dildos
just to hear this woman’s story

A whole bed was for sale
and a claw-footed bathtub
a motorcycle, a large stack of books
lingerie and ten photo albums
Photo albums?
Leafing through, I could see that they were all
happy couple love photos:
their trip to Hawaii
backpacking through Europe
mountain climbing in Tibet

And I shouldn’t forget to mention all of the love notes
three huge cardboard boxes full of them. I picked one up:
I stood outside your window for hours last night
while you were sleeping
hoping you would feel me there, and pull open the curtain

I approached her as she sat by the cash box
wearing a pair of oversized pink sunglasses
So, this is everything he ever gave you? I asked her, trying to be nonchalant
She nodded
I was going to light it all on fire, she told me
But what’s the point?
True, I replied, not sure what else to say
She seemed so peaceful about it. Almost happy

Just then I noticed a pile of cds:
Jane’s Joy Ride Mix
Jane’s Taking a Bath Mix
Mix for Jane for When She’s Feeling a Little Blue
And one called
In Case of an Emergency, I LOVE YOU
It was sealed with yellow CAUTION tape
and had obviously never been opened

Can I buy this? I asked her
$3.50, she said
I gave her the money and put the cd in my car
and cried and could not open it

(Today’s poem originally appeared in Rattle , where it was a 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Lytton Bell has published five books, won six poetry contests and performed at many California literary venues. Her work has appeared in over three dozen journals, web sites and e-zines. She lives in Sacramento, California. Lytton earned a poetry scholarship to the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts in 1988, where she studied with Deb Burnham and poet Len Roberts. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Bryn Mawr College in 1993. Feel free to send Lytton an email at lytton_bell@hotmail.com.

Editor’s Note: Clear, narrative, and heartbreaking. Lytton Bell has a knack for relaying the real. What a fascinating moment, the intersection of these two lives, and how breathtaking the way their shared story speaks to us all.

Want to read more by and about Lytton Bell?
Poetica Erotica
Buy Nectar as an eBook from Amazon
Buy Body Image from Amazon

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: VALENTINA GNUP

Posted on June 22, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

WE SPEAK OF AUGUST
By Valentina Gnup

Alone in my kitchen, I copy
a chicken salad recipe from a Woman’s Day magazine
and plan tomorrow night’s dinner.

We don’t know what will happen
between one raindrop and the next,
yet we speak of August as if it were a contract,
a promise the sky made.

When I was twenty-five I married a drummer
and silenced him with disapproval.

Now I’m married to a poet—
he reads poems on the porch
and pets my head like a puppy.

My daughters grew tall as honeysuckle and left—
they took their soft skin, their buttermilk biscuit smell,
the endless hungers that organized my days.

My domain has shrunk to the narrow bone of my ankle.

I did what was asked.
I did what I feared.
Like every woman I have ever known,
I became my mother.

I stroll through the rows of houses and yards;
above me a skein of geese break in and out of formation—
fluid as laundry on a line.

Other women are out walking their dogs,
murmuring to the mothers inside their heads.

In the eastern sky the first star is out,
preparing for the long night of wishes.

At dusk every flower looks blue.

(Today’s poem originally appeared in Rattle , where it was given a Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention in 2010, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Valentina Gnup has her MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She is the winner of the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize from Cutthroat journal of the Arts and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Prize. In 2005 her chapbook Sparrow Octaves won the North Carolina Writers’ Network Mary Belle Campbell Book Publication Award. Her poems have appeared in the Hiram Poetry Review, Nimrod, Chelsea, Brooklyn Review, Crab Orchard Review and many others. She and her husband live in Portland, Oregon.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem could be about regret or acceptance. It could be about rites of passage or about the inevitability of the cycle of life. The young woman makes mistakes. The experienced woman knows what it is to have made compromises, to have made sacrifices, to bend with the wind, and to become her mother. There is a nostalgia inherent in today’s piece; a longing not for the past, but a bittersweet looking both forward and back. Gnup’s startlingly honest reflection is paired with beautifully-wrought moments of language and imagery that heighten the joy and pain of a lived life.

Want to read more by and about Valentina Gnup?
The Best American Poetry
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation / wagingpeace.org
the-green-heart call

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: CARL PHILLIPS

Posted on May 18, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

CHROMATIC BLACK
By Carl Phillips

Of the many things that he used to say to me, there are two
I’m certain of: You taste like a last less-than-long summer afternoon
by the shore just before September; and

You’re the kind of betrayal, understand, I’ve been waiting for,
all my life. When did remembering stop meaning
to be lit from within—bodily—
and the mind, briefly flickering
again out—wasn’t that forgetting? Somewhere
abandon’s still just a word to be turned away from, as from a man
on fire. Remorse, I think,
is not regret. How new, as in full of chance, the nights here
still can seem to be,
if you keep your eyes closed. Here’s a lullaby:
“No more bondage, no triumph either, no more the bluing waves
of shame…”

(Today’s poem originally appeared in Ploughshares and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Carl Phillips is the author of twelve books of poems, most recently Silverchest. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Editor’s Note: Carl Phillips is a master of the-line-that-blows-you-away. “You’re the kind of betrayal, understand, I’ve been waiting for, / all my life.” “Somewhere / abandon’s still just a word to be turned away from, as from a man / on fire” “Remorse, I think, / is not regret.” This poet speaks the truth, rewriting the world in a way we all wish we could. I, for one, am humbled.

Want to read more by and about Carl Phillips?
Poets.org
The Poetry Foundation
Q & A on Smartish Pace

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: TONY HOAGLAND

Posted on May 11, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

THE COMPLEX SENTENCE
By Tony Hoagland

The kind Italian driver of the bus to Rome
invited her to his house—she was obviously
hungry—and gave her sandwiches
and raped her.

All those years ago—she smiles
while telling it—contemptuous,
somehow
of her younger self,

who drags behind her like a can.
Grammar is great
but who will write the sentence that includes
the story of the damage to her soul

and how she thought her bad Italian
was at fault, and
how it took a month for her to say
the word for what had happened
in her head?

But that’s why
we invented the complex sentence,
so we could stand at a distance,

making slight adjustments
of the harness,
while following the twisty, ever-turning plot:

the loneliness of what we did;
the loneliness
of what was done to us.

(Today’s poem originally appeared in Ploughshares and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Tony Hoagland has published five books of poetry and prose about poetry with Graywolf Press.

Editor’s Note: Isn’t language amazing? How it unfolds, at once telling a story and creating the safe/dangerous/charged space that story can exist within? Tony Hoaglan is a true master of the sentence. He understands its complexities, knows how to manipulate the malleable material with his pen. How complex the sentence needs to be that can carry the weight of today’s message, how artful the poet who brings the sentence and the story to life.

Want to read more by and about Tony Hoagland?
Friday Poetry Series on As It Ought To Be
Poets.org
The Poetry Foundation

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: PRAYERS LIKE SHOES

Posted on March 30, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

FROM PRAYERS LIKE SHOES
By Ruth Forman

STAND

why so afraid to stand up?
someone will tell you
sit down?

but here is the truth
someone will always tell you
sit down

the ones we remember
kept standing

PRAYERS LIKE SHOES

I wear prayers like shoes

pull em on quiet each morning
take me through the uncertain day

don’t know
what might knock me off course

sit up in bed
pull on the right
then the left
before shower before teeth

my mama’s gift
to walk me through this life

she wore strong ones
the kind steady your ankles
i know
cause when her man left/ her children
gone/ her eldest son without goodbye
they the only ones keep her
standing

i saw her
still standing

mama passed on
some things to me
ma smile sense a discipline
ma
subtle behind

but best she passed on
girl you go to God
and get you some good shoes
cause this life ain’t steady ground

now i don’t wear hers
you take em with you you know
but i suspect they made by the same company
pull em on each morning
first the right then the left

best piece a dress
i got

THESE HIPS

these hips ripe plums
don’t believe
come
taste

these midnight moons
made a sugar’s juice
know how to curve a line
make a knife shiver
in anticipation

these hips ripe plums
don’t believe
run yr hand long this

n tell me

God did not know what She was doing
when She
gentled her hand
in a half moon
two times
smoothed
the most perfect
fruit
on earth

THE AIR ABOVE OUR TONGUES

We do not speak. afraid
of what might happen to us

the air above our tongues
prays for us to speak. afraid
of what might happen
if we don’t

Prayers Like Shoes: Whit Press, in partnership with Hedgebrook, presents this magnificent collection of poetry from highly acclaimed writer and poet Ruth Forman. “Ruth Forman’s Prayers Like Shoes is a book you will carry with you for life, give to people you love, and turn to in times of joy and sadness. Her words are as natural as grass and air, and the stories they tell will travel from the page to your heart.” — Gloria Steinem

Ruth Forman is the author of three award-winning books: poetry collections We Are the Young Magicians (Beacon, 1993) and Renaissance, (Beacon, 1997) and children’s book, Young Cornrows Callin Out the Moon (Children’s Book Press, 2007). She is the recipient of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, The Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, The Durfee Artist Fellowship, the National Council of Teachers of English Notable Book Award, and recognition by The American Library Association. She provides writing workshops at schools and universities across the country and abroad, and has presented in forums such as the United Nations, the PBS series The United States of Poetry and National Public Radio. Ruth is a former teacher of creative writing with the University of Southern California and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and an eleven-year faculty member with the VONA-Voices writing program. Also an MFA graduate of the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television, she frequently collaborates on film, music, dance, theatre, art and media projects. Her latest collection is Prayers Like Shoes (2009) on Whit Press. When not writing and teaching, she practices a passion for martial arts: classical Yang family style tai chi chuan, tai chi sword, bo staff and karate. Ms. Forman currently lives in Washington, DC.

Editor’s Note: Today’s feature is more than a book of poetry, it is a gift. When my father passed away I found myself more determined to go on, to function, than to break down and mourn his loss. It was a book of poems that enabled me to weep, to grieve. It is a rare book that allows you to access the real human being who dwells within you, beneath the surface of what you imagine to be your ‘real life.’ This is such a book.

On the strong recommendation of a friend I bought Prayers Like Shoes. Because time is a luxury in my life, I began reading it while waiting for the bus. By the time the bus arrived—by the time I reached the bottom of the first page—I was in tears.

I read from cover to cover, on bus and train, first on my way into the world, then on my way home again. At times I felt the Woman inside me awaken, celebrate. At times I felt inspired to speak up in the name of peace. I wondered at love, at the nature of man. Throughout—within the delicate, vibrant, intricate fabric of Forman’s weaving—my heart was so close to the surface that the tears fell when they would.

I wondered what the people on the bus thought of me with my book of poems and my well of tears, but, mostly I was inspired. I was reminded of what I love in poetry. Experience. Connectivity. Reading someone else’s words and feeling that I am not alone, that I am part of a community, of a human world. That life is beautiful and painful and hard and that it is poetry—honest, vocal, unapologetic, lived, felt, lyric poetry—that makes the living more bearable, that gives us permission to experience emotion while offering us an outlet for the same.

I chose the quote above by Gloria Steinem because, first of all, what poet is touted by Gloria Steinem?!, but also because it speaks the truth about this book. I want to give a copy to my mother, to my Sisters, to the people I love and admire who engage with poetry as I do. I will turn to this book when I want to feel, and also when I want to remember why I write poetry. I cannot imagine a greater gift than that.

Want to see more by Ruth Forman?
Ruth Forman’s Official Website
Buy Ruth Forman’s books

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ANDREA COHEN

Posted on March 23, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

THE COMMITTEE WEIGHS IN
By Andrea Cohen

I tell my mother
I’ve won the Nobel Prize.

Again? she says. Which
discipline this time?

It’s a little game
we play: I pretend

I’m somebody, she
pretends she isn’t dead.

(Today’s poem originally appeared in The Threepenny Review and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Andrea Cohen writes and swims in Watertown, MA. Her heroes have swum Venetian canals, the Chattahoochee, and The English Channel. Her poems and stories have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, Memorious and elsewhere. Her fourth poetry collection, Furs Not Mine, will be published by Four Way Books.

Other collections include Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry 2009), and The Cartographer’s Vacation (Owl Creek Press 1999). She has received a PEN Discovery Award, Glimmer Train‘s Short Fiction Award, the Owl Creek Poetry Prize and several fellowships at The MacDowell Colony. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.

Editor’s Note: It seems so simple. Eight lines. Four stanzas. Setup, volta, powerful ending. But how to entrap the reader so deftly in a few quick strokes? How to convey the depth of loss in such a space? What deception, what brutal truth, what devastation. It takes a master of her craft to wright such a poem; Cohen makes it appear effortless.

Want to read more by and about Andrea Cohen?
Andrea Cohen’s Official Website
Buy Andrea Cohen’s books
Read more of Andrea Cohen’s poems

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: IT BROKE ANYWAY

Posted on March 16, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

FROM IT BROKE ANYWAY
By April Michelle Bratten

THE SEE-THROUGH GIRL

The first time Kyle punched me,
he did it on the thigh.

He said he imagined
bashing my head in
with a hammer
on a quiet evening
in the summer.

I asked him then,
what is the point
of banging through a
ghost?

He kept trying
to kill me anyway,
usually on
Saturday nights,
after the booze ran
lukewarm and thin,
the music sputtered
and dulled out,
and his boiling eyes
caught me red-cunted,
turned me translucent.

He did it because his socks weren’t sparkling white.
He did it because I had the mean face of a fish.
He did it because he simply ran out of things to say.
He did it because he felt like it.
He did it again and again until his hands unscrewed
and returned to feathers.

The last time Kyle punched me,
the ghost left the house.

I followed her,
that see-through girl,
all over town
until she stopped
by the woods
and held out a hand
full of leaves.

She was blue,
or maybe it was just the sky
behind her,
but she was there
and she was grinning
like a goon.

MY MOUTH HAS TURNED GRAVEYARD

My mouth has turned graveyard,
as if death could carry me,
as if I could carry death,
as if I could crawl bare kneed
to save the sparrow.

I am not woman enough
to fall asleep near the wild onion root,
to carry a boy
inside my mother-parts,
to guide an attentive heart
around the sad curve
of flown pale eyes,
or to love the hand that finds my own.

I have found no solace for this
in lost languages,
and I do not wish to speak
of the ghost I know
who clings my legs,
or the warm tickle of little fingers
that pool the elbow.

Instead I heap beds of dirt
inside my womb
(good enough for no-thing
to rest a tired head)

to keep the worms hungry,
to keep the hair grown wild,
to keep the glass broken,
to keep the egg as my own,

to stomach the makers with
their loud beating wings.

LID ON TIGHT

I have never seen frangipani, ghost orchids,
or the milk that slides from the root.

I have wasted too much time sniffing in gardens,
pissing in jars.

I want to hear the sun tip-toe down my stairs,
a soft bladder in its teeth.

It will creep. It will slow its big shining feet. It will bite.

The rain will dribble on the stairs until morning.

“It Broke Anyway, which pays homage to the trials and tribulations of women, reminds me of the Bob Dylan Song, “Just Like a Woman,” except that Bratten’s characters never break just like little girls. Instead she creates multidimensional characters who will remind you of your sister, mother, grandmothers, aunts, girl friends and most notably yourself. Bratten’s cunning parallels, chilling narratives, and haunting endings remind us what breaks is often more epochal than what remains intact.”
– Rebecca Schumejda, author of Cadillac Men

April Michelle Bratten was born in Marrero, Louisiana. She received her Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Minot State University in Minot, North Dakota. April was a finalist for the Best of the Net award in 2009 and was nominated again in 2010. She was also nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize. Her work has been widely published in both print and online, including the journals Istanbul Literary Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, San Pedro River Review, Southeast Review, Gutter Eloquence, Kill Poet, The Orange Room Review, and Dark Sky Magazine among others. She co-edits and writes book reviews for the online literary journal Up the Staircase Quarterly, which can be found at www.upthestaircase.org.

Editor’s Note: April Michelle Bratten’s It Broke Anyway is a book in the shape of a girl. A girl who dredged herself up from the mud, the blood, the broken. It is a voice in the shape of a dry scratch, a moan, a haunting. It is vengeance and clarity freed from shattered glass. Here lies a world carved out of American Gothic, hauled up from the Deep South, the world Kate Durbin spoke of when she warned, “Not a world for little girls.”

Bratten’s tales take the shape of folkloric vignettes that speak for a thousand female voices, while her personal confessions are clear, raw, and brutally honest. This is a book wrenched from the darkness of lived experience, of survival. This is a book that “was born / next to a trolley car / in the deep south,” written by a poet who is “only a wish, / blown from the seeds of the dying dandelion,” where poems “have scribbled secrets / across their white backs.”

At times the persona of the poet takes the shape of the grotesque or the fantastical in an effort to honestly convey the inner life on the page: “I have antlers, / antlers that bow over my table, obscene protrusions, / dark and magnificent;” “I will not become picturesque / or tame, / because in this moment, / I remain, / wanting;” “I want to squeeze the reasons from her throat, / make her explain why, at 25, / I dug my fingers inside my own chest, and began to eat;” “I stand on a pile of soot with a devil. / He tells me I am the damned.” This voluminous text is at once a healing and a purging because “When a book goes unread it turns into a body, / a woman, / a dry poison.”

Want to see more by April Michelle Bratten?
Buy It Broke Anyway on Amazon
Author Page @ NeoPoiesis Press
Up the Staircase Quarterly

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: HEARTWRECKS

Posted on February 23, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

FROM HEARTWRECKS
By Nicolas Destino

RESURRECTION

Back in the city they were erecting the moon every night with ropes, pulling, as everything needed to rise to reverse what fell. In an upstate kitchen, amid the languid, flat dough, they got the news that there would be no more bread, not until the moon was back up and pulling of its own accord.

INDIGENOUS

Miraculous to be part of the snow globe with the penguins on the icebergs and the icebergs with the cold shock and miraculous to be inside the dome with the curvature of the dome and the penguins’ head and the cold shock far from the city where this is not taking place and to be apart from the towers and a part of interiors with the curve of the moon made from clay.

SLEEP THERAPY

Things like giraffes, that’s all, and catalogue items, ordinary things; driving in the snow in the repetitive shapes of snowflakes, and things like fruit markets and police activity activating the amalgams of scriptures inscribing all the checklists that qualify a city, but the real story is the flashing number right in a waiting room, outside of which people have held doors in restaurants for strangers, or have stolen their pocketbooks or parking spaces, or have let doors slam on strangers, but the real story is that I would give up all these dirty thoughts for healthcare.

Heartwrecks: In this debut collection, musical notes, paint pigment, and lives of the heart converge in fantastical worlds of invention. Nicolas Destino’s adventures through relationship, music, and visual art revitalize the lyric and re-imagine the ordinary.

Nicolas Destino’s work has appeared in The American Poetry Journal, The Bellevue Literary Review, Barge Journal, 580split, 322 Review, and others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at Goddard College, and his first full-length collection of poems, Heartwrecks, was released by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2013.

Editor’s Note: Nicolas Destino’s Heartwrecks is one of the best and most original books of poetry to be published in recent memory. The poet himself has said, “These are not poems” because these vignettes are so imagistic, visual, and painterly that they are more akin to waking dreams than to the written word. Not only does the poet embrace the visual and painterly, but Heartwrecks is rife with musicality and deeply interested in the language of music. The book also contemplates urban life, marriage, partnership, natural disasters, weather, and life as seen from within the curved glass of the snow globe. All of these concerns are wrought from the finest materials, the poet’s masterly handle on the lyric guiding the reader through an incredibly deep, thoughtful, stunning, humorous, and intensely pleasurable book of poems that ought to be read from start to finish. And then again. And then again and again.

Want to see more by Nicolas Destino?
Nicolas Destino Official Website
Buy Heartwrecks from Sibling Rivalry Press
Buy Heartwrecks from Amazon

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