Tag: Poetry

Signage

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Signage

by Hannah Stephenson

Stores die with the same velocity as bugs.
One day, humming, clicking. Shiny doors
parting like beetle wings. And then, gone.
Emptied out. A shell. The sudden voicelessness
of the SupeRx, its sign darkened and waiting
to be pried from the building. The town talks
about it. This is how they mourn. And when
the people of the town encounter those
they know working a till at the grocery store,
or behind bank glass, SupeRx gets stuffed
into the quiet between them. Always Did you
hear about the SupeRx, mmhmm, isn’t it
a shame. That a strange, new business
can rise to its feet in a body not belonging
to it. Blue signage plastered over yellow.
Shameful, the brutal reincarnation
of buildings. It’s a pharmacy again within
the month, sentenced to revisiting sickness,
the earnestness with which we fix ourselves.

***

Hannah Stephenson is a poet, editor, and instructor living in Columbus, Ohio (where she also runs a monthly literary event series called Paging Columbus). Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, Hobart, Poetry Daily, and The Nervous Breakdown; her collection, In the Kettle, the Shriek, is now available from Gold Wake Press. Recently, she served as Editor for The Ides of March: An Anthology of of Ohio Poets (Columbus Creative Cooperative), and she is co-editor (with Okla Elliott) of the biannual anthology New Poetry from the Midwest (New American Press). You can visit her online at The Storialist (www.thestorialist.com).

[The above poem is from In the Kettle, the Shriek and is reprinted here with permission of the author.]

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: UNDRESSING

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from UNDRESSING
By Nicole Steinberg


BEAUTY

is a ritual, passed
along in slow drags
of the fingers—foundation
swept across cheekbones
in runny smears, stark
beige until it blends.
Salt, pepper, and ashtrays;
we keep the kitchen
warm with smoke and
sweet, still-wet hair.
A silver lipstick tube
rolls ribbed between us.
One day I’ll carry
your bones in sacks.
I’ll remember cotton
pressed into your eyes
and up your nostrils. I’ll be
sorry they ever listened,
when I said I wanted
to see you that way.
You switch to violet
lips after some years,
which clash with your
bleached hair. I miss
the old burgundy outline.
Draw lines to prevent
bleeding, you once explained.
Hold back the color
of your mouth and
every careless thing
it wants to say.


MY DARK, SEMITIC WILES

I took my dark, Semitic wiles on the road.
The train was empty and that was lovely,
everywhere an open space. En route to Berlin,
I held the bathroom mirror and spoke
to my mother, foreign leaves of foreign trees
and the conductor’s garbled nothings
blurred above my head. She thinks I’m going
to get myself killed. Lost forever. I remember
a straight-haired little girl at the kindergarten
table with eyeglasses as petite as her pink
Polly Pocket. I crushed them in my fat hand,
arranged the lozenge lenses next to the legs,
purple plastic bird femurs. Like chicken,
I picked it apart. My fellow passengers,
the unwed Jewess rides among you, come
to tour your capital of tragedy. Love me
out of guilt like an unborn sister, a mother’s
final scowl before death, the very nose
on your face you’d hack off just to belong.


THERE IS NO ROMANTIC

Truly, everything is monstrous,
even wild horses and especially
their heads. The tree trunk necks
of boys who finish sandwiches
in three bites and the impatient
lumps that harden in their freshly
bleached briefs. We’re all so warm
and pink, it’s obscene. I don’t want any
part of it. It took me years to learn
simple tasks: how to snap my fingers,
tie my shoes. My mother’s early gaze
full of worry that love would escape
me, too. If I peel back my breast, I’ll find her
passport heart, stamps still smeared
from all the quailing in Queens, the tears
in Tel Aviv. She taught me this: the way
a woman travels, under a moving
shadow of small panic; all too aware
that even a plane about to crash,
for one bright, myopic moment,
will fill completely with the sun.


Today’s poems are from Undressing, published by dancing girl press, copyright © 2014 by Nicole Steinberg, and appear here today with permission from the poet. “There is No Romantic” previously appeared via 30 x Lace, and “My Dark, Semitic Wiles” previously appeared via Leveler.


Nicole Steinberg is the author of Getting Lucky, now available from Spooky Girlfriend Press, Birds of Tokyo (dancing girl press, 2011), and two new chapbooks in 2014: Undressing from dancing girl press and Clever Little Gang from Furniture Press, winner of the 4X4 Chapbook Award. She is also the editor of an anthology, Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens (SUNY Press, 2011).

Editor’s Note: I love chapbooks. And small presses. And books that are little works of art to hold in your hands, open, and immerse yourself in. Undressing is such a book; one of 200+ books made to date by dancing girl press, which publishes titles “by emerging women poets in delectable open-run handmade editions.” Delectable. Yes. From its beautiful cover art to its textured binding and hand-cut pages, this is the kind of creation that can never be replaced by an ebook.

Within its pages, Undressing is just that. The poet sheds her veils like Salome, stripping off not only clothes, but skin, revealing the raw bits of flesh and bone, organ and memory, that comprise an inner life. At times Nicole Steinberg looks at herself critically, as a woman does when considering her reflection in a mirror, her point of view filtered through a smog of American cultural misogyny. At other times Steinberg puts on the dress of her mother, of illness and loss, of the guilt and introspection and distortion that remains.

Amidst a maelstrom of pop culture, feminism, religion, sex, relationships, and memory, there is something hectic in these poems, like the pile of clothes at the foot of a bed. But amidst the torrent there are moments in which the poet forces us to slow down and face the reality she unveils head on. There are lines so poignant they wash over their more topical surroundings, forcing us to breathe and remember we are engaged with an artifact: “Draw lines to prevent / bleeding, you once explained. / Hold back the color / of your mouth and / every careless thing / it wants to say.” “She taught me this: the way / a woman travels, under a moving / shadow of small panic; all too aware / that even a plane about to crash, for one bright, myopic moment, / will fill completely with the sun.”

Want to see more from Nicole Steinberg?
Nicole Steinberg’s Official Blog
Buy Undressing and Birds of Tokyo from dancing girl press
Buy Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens on Amazon

Taking Shade with Buddha

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Taking Shade with Buddha

by Mark Murphy

Of all the dense vegetation in this wild country
I have come to take shade with Buddha
(though he is equally at ease in sun or shadow)
under the bent branches of the Bodhi tree.

Frankly, it is not the best spot to make camp,
break the night’s fast,
or break the habits of a life-time
but Buddha seems at home, like a man who has lived

irreverent aeons alone – he makes a welcome as only he can –
confident of my comings and goings, naked
as one new born, sure that living is its own answer,
he offers figs for my hunger.

Slowly then, Buddha savours the morning air
as though it were sustenance enough
while the first light bakes the land
and each man and beast in the field is busy with the crop.

Already, I am in at the deep-end with my questions:
what if the knowledge of trees is no knowledge at all –
and if the trees should support the sky no more,
and the deliberate hush in the night really is the end, then what?

But Buddha is having none of it. And indeed, why should he trouble,
being at one, as he is, with forest, sky and the hallowed ground.
And by and by a talkative brook bothers the shadows
and Buddha is smiling – pleased at the sound of water on stone.

For an instant, he is like a child who has found his mother’s hand
in some crowded place and then a moment later
he is old all over again like a being who has lived many lives.
Buddha breathes deeply. He breathes in the universe.

 

***

Mark A. Murphy is the author of two chapbooks, Tin Cat Alley and Our Little Bit of Immortality. Murphy’s poems have been published in over 100 magazines and ezines in 17 different countries world wide. His first full length collection, Night-watch Man & Muse was published in November 2013 from Salmon Poetry (Eire). He is currently working on a new play, Lenny’s Wake for which he is looking for a publisher.

A Review of Jade Sylvan’s Kissing Oscar Wilde

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Slyvan_Kissing Oscar Wilde

A Review of Jade Sylvan’s Kissing Oscar Wilde

By Ashley Paul

Kissing Oscar Wilde by Jade Sylvan is a collection of essays that will cause readers to lose their breath in wide-eyed expression. in particular because of Sylvan’s excellent use of tongue-in-cheek writing within each piece in this collection.

The essays in Kissing Oscar Wilde detail Sylvan’s life after college and the reading of her written work at various clubs and cafés across Europe. The essays create a visual of crashing couches at the home of new friends along with the progression of Sylvan as an artist. What is the allure of artists leaving the Midwest? A question most curious because of Sylvan’s Midwestern roots and inspiration to travel the world to immerse herself in what is being offered. A question also answered in her search to attain creative ability.

Whether delivered in the form of poetry, play, or prose, each essay is well written and showcases Slyvan’s unique voice. The poems are a stream of consciousness pulled deep from her mind. She does not have an airy approach to life and is more of artistic, experimental, thrill-seeker alongside friends Caleb and Thade, who are integral parts of each essay.

In the prose piece, “We’ll Always Have Paris,” contemporary meets modern. Internet. Nicholas Chauvin. Casablanca. Patti Smith. In the piece, Sylvan talks of her need to leave the Midwest and her conservative parents who said she was “confusingly artistic at the best of times and embarrassingly perverse at the worst.” She would sit with Caleb under a graffitied bridge and talk about their fears and every artist’s doom: having to work a 9-5. It was there, under the bridge, that she gained the desire to visit “different famous people’s graves.”

Sylvan’s awkwardness is beguiling, leaving the reader with an image of Sylvan shrugging her shoulders as she tells her stories, of telling us, “Eff it.” But spirits can’t be much more free than Sylvan’s. These essays become the words of an older sister telling us what or what not to do, which mistakes we want to make. Her words are a comfort, too, because maybe we’ve already been there.

Sylvan is not shy in disclosing to readers her fear of becoming suffocated by not being able to create art. Plenty of people can look back on their twenties and tell the same stories, but the decisions Sylvan makes and recounts for readers here present a twist on that recognizable narrative, an inspiration for trying something new. In “Halloween 2011, Boston,” Sylvan goes on a semi-rant after losing a job she never wanted. She does not even tell us what the job was, but she explains the context of her disappointment in this way: “Because I’d woken up again sweating bourbon into unwashed sheets in my ten-foot by ten-foot occupation in a house rented to me dirt-cheap by an entrepreneurial acquaintance out of pity/patronage….” Sylvan writes here with hardly any punctuation, showing readers the unfiltered fluidity of her thoughts that lead to her eventual decision to take half of her $1500 savings and buy a plane ticket to France, where she goes on to read most of her written work.

The essays have the commonality of not being rooted in plot. There is a reflection that comes through where the work does not follow the standard of fashioned essay writing. Her footnotes are an afterthought to a life well experienced. The essays detail everything from Patti Smith to how to be a “proper slut,” where Sylvan’s writing crescendos to worldly living. Patti Smith was of inspiration because of her book Just Kids and Sylvan’s subsequent emotional response. Sylvan writes of a joke between her and her friend Caleb that she was the Patti Smith to his Robert Mapplethorpe. Sylvan even brings her idolization into her physical appearance, with a “shoulder-length Patti Smith-inspired shag.”

Sylvan, who founded a group for queer artists in Bloomington during her college years, writes of her pansexual history and gender nonconformity as a vehicle that highlights her growth as an artist. In “An Epically-Abridged Catalogue of the Author’s Major Romances, Revealing the Young Midwestern Author’s Odyssey Through Fluid Sexuality,” Sylvan memorably shares her intimate experiences within the context of how her own identity is thus established.

Sylvan explains her connection to Oscar Wilde through the kisses people have put on his grave. Later in the collection, she writes of her own experience with kissing the grave. Sylvan delves even more into these ideas with “The Poem I Wrote For Louis and Later Gave To Adelaide,” as well as with the poem “Kissing Oscar Wilde.” The title of the collection does not quite compliment the corresponding essay, but maybe there is an irony to that. The title is romantic, a side-step from the tone of the essays themselves.

With in an intriguing title illuminating a work of nonfiction that fits fantasy and downright rearranges all forms of comedy, primarily sarcasm, readers will find many spontaneous moments of laughter make the lungs feel harmonious. This book could be finished in a single sitting, but readers will want to savor each word, marinating in the details. The chronology of Jade Sylvan’s story hits in small ripples that are uniquely brushed with tender attention, asking readers to lend that same attention as they take in her excellent work.

Jade Sylvan, Kissing Oscar Wilde. Write Bloody Publishing, 2013: $15.00.

***

Ashley Paul lives for a dried ink pen. Her blog, Harvey Dntd The Milk, details her love of film in all its glory. She is passionate about working with students on their personal development through education. Soon to begin pursuing a Master’s in School Counseling at New York University, Paul currently happily volunteers to help first graders spell “home” and third graders tackle shapes. Through 826LA, a non-profit writing organization, Paul works with high school students in under-resourced schools to help individuals develop reading-comprehension and writing-expression skills, and it makes her feel spectacular.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: THE BURDEN OF LIGHT

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from THE BURDEN OF LIGHT: POEMS ON ILLNESS AND LOSS
Edited by Tanya Chernov
Selected Poems From the Anthology By Sivan Butler-Rotholz:



ELEGY FOR THE STILL LIVING:
FATHER CANNOT STAND STILL

[My father taught me] every time you breathe in,
say thank you. Every time you breathe out, say goodbye.
                                                                             —Li-Young Lee

The thing about my father is I wear my sadness like the inside of a jar.
How can you not see inside of it? How the slightest bit of air destroys me.
How I love him so much          I struggle

                           to love him

                                                                    at all.



GENESIS

i. The thing is, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX and in this way the world was created.

ii. Definitions

“Wife”:           The person I love most
                         in the world.

“Death”:         He is not here
                         in this hole
                         in the ground
                         piled with dirt
                         and seashells.

“Mother”:       Inlaid tongue.

“Wedding”:    When I was young I liked to play ‘wedding’ and my father would walk me                          down the aisle and it’s a good thing he did then because
                         Flowers are like that.

“How”:            We go on

“Flowers”:      Are not stones.

“One God”:     Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us.



Today’s poems are from The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss, available by donation on Smashwords and Amazon. These poems appear here today with permission from the poet.


The Burden of Light: Part poetry anthology, part field guide, part multimedia art collection, The Burden of Light offers its readers companionship through the darkest days. With work by artists who have confronted serious illness or grief in their own lives, the poems and artwork in these pages hold the power to touch the heart, stir the mind, and heal the spirit, each in its own way. These pieces illuminate the vital force of our humanity, while encouraging us to reach out to others in need.

With 100% of the proceeds benefiting the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance, even a small donation from one has the power to affect change when added to the contributions of others. Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in America, yet this cancer is largely preventable when detected early. By supporting the groundbreaking work of the NCCRA, we’re all helping to promote regular medical screening and fund the research needed to develop better tests, treatments, and ultimately, a cure. Just as The Burden of Light is designed to help readers move forward from trauma, so too will donations help those currently experiencing serious illness.


Editor’s Note: Yes, yes, today’s poems are a first here on the Saturday Poetry Series in that they are written by your faithful editor. I am honored to be featured in this anthology alongside a plethora of talented artists, including SPS-beloved poet Peggy Shumaker. But beyond sharing a little of my own work with you here for the first time, I wanted to share with you this important collection.

Whether you purchase it for your Kindle or download it as a PDF, you get to decide how much you want to pay for this anthology, and 100% of the proceeds benefit the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance. Via the Kindle edition or PDF you will find links to listen to the poets read their poems aloud, for an added layer of experience and immersion. This is a thoughtful, powerful, philanthropic endeavor with the power to both move the reader and effectuate change.

Check out the full anthology for more poems by yours truly and many more talented poets writing through their own experiences with illness and grief. Please donate what you can, and then go forth and read!


Want more from The Burden of Light?
Download the PDF via Smashwords
Purchase the Kindle edition from Amazon
Listen to “Elegy for the Still Living: Father Cannot Stand Still”
Listen to “Genesis”

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MEGAN MORIARTY

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Moriarty Author Photo

LOOKING AT US LIVING
By Megan Moriarty

Through the binoculars, we saw us
moving through the foliage.

The world was on rewind:
a herd of horses ran
backwards across a field.

Yellow leaves kept climbing back
to their branches.

“What’s the opposite of fall?” I said,
and he said “Spring.”

Then it was August, then July,
then June. The sun kept
leaving and coming back

like a boomerang that no one
ever had to throw.

Snow appeared
on the ground, then it started
unsnowing, the flakes
travelling upwards.

I knew that soon
we wouldn’t know each other

so I asked him
what the opposite
of stay is.

He stood there,
his hands on his hips, thinking.


Today’s poem was published in the Summer 2011 issue of Rattle, and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Megan Moriarty grew up surrounded by water in Staten Island, New York and currently finds herself surrounded by mountains in Hillsboro, West Virginia. She holds an MFA in poetry from Virginia Tech and is the author of From the Dictionary of Living Things, a collection of dictionary definition poems.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is magic, full of fantastical invention and a vivid, playful story life. I am reminded of the work of Nicolas Destino, a beloved poet here on As It Ought To Be. What wonder, what imagination, what playfulness of concept, what love of ideas mirrored in the written word.

Want to read more by Megan Moriarty?
Buy From the Dictionary of Living Things from Finishing Line Press
Indiana Review
Vinyl Poetry
Jointed Autumn

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LOUISE MATHIAS

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Louise Desert headshot

THE PROBLEM OF HANDS
By Louise Mathias

And how to fill them
is the problem of cigarettes and paint.

First time I felt my undoing
was in front of

a painting—Sam Francis, I believe.

Oh, his bloomed out, Xanax-ed California.

I liked the word guard, but you know

we made each other
nervous, standing too close

for everyone concerned. All art being

a form of violence
as a peony
is violence.

Here you come

with your open hands.


Today’s poem previously appeared via the Academy of American Poets and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Louise Mathias grew up in England and Los Angeles. She is the author of two books of poems, Lark Apprentice, which won the New Issues Poetry Prize, and The Traps, released in 2013 from Four Way Books. She lives in Joshua Tree, a small town in California’s Mojave Desert.

Editor’s Note: As my faithful readers of this series know, I am a sucker for a poem with a killer ending. In today’s piece, it is the penultimate moment that takes my breath away: “All art being // a form of violence / as a peony / is violence.” What a stunning phrase. Followed by the gift of release, of promise: “Here you come // with your open hands.”

Once again I have Dr. Poet Jenny Stella to thank for bringing today’s poem to my attention. Viva la poesia!

Want to read more by Louise Mathias?
Verse Daily
The Traps from Four Way Books
The Rumpus
The Offending Adam
Everyday Genius

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ROSE NIELSEN

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WATER-WITCH
By Rose Nielsen

As April mist blew chill against the rocky beach,
the wishing pines, the trembling birch and cedars
leaned out as if to catch a glimpse of Mary Lake’s
ice petticoat swept to shore on last night’s tempest.

Divining rod in hand, stem pointing at the lake,
Y hugging at my hips, I felt no tug;
I thought the misty air, the soggy forest floor
must be too drenched to dowse a single source.

But when I looked again and saw the leaning birches
reach out their limbs, each one a pair of arms
held out to greet the lake, I turned the stem to point
toward me and felt the tug as it divined a hidden spring.


Today’s poem appears here today with permission from the poet.


Rose Nielsen is a writer, poet, musician, and a physical therapist in a small mountain town in British Columbia, Canada. She also teaches biology and English at the local community college. She recently received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her work has appeared or will be appearing in RiverLit and CV2; and she is working on a novel and on a collection of poems about water and the bonds humans hold with it.

Editor’s Note: Rose Nielsen’s poetry reminds me of Alaska’s Poet Laureate, Peggy Shumaker, a favorite here on this series. These poets share a love of the interconnectivity of nature and the written word. Simple, yet rich, and working on the micro level, with sounds lulling and inspiring us, with images clear as if painted by brushstroke.

As tomorrow is Mother’s Day, I dedicate today’s selection to my Mama. The woman who taught me the wonders of water, witchcraft, nature, and poetry alike. For my mother, and for Mother Earth, the Great Mother of us all.

Want to read more by Rose Nielsen?
River Lit

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JENNA LE

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Jenna Le photo

By Jenna Le:


MOM’S COCKS

Mom grew up beside the Perfume River in Vietnam,
in a brick house overrun by chickens.
Those horny-footed fowl were always
rubbing their feather-padded genitals
against sofa legs and children’s shoes
as if they were fit to burst. Mom laughs

as she tells me how they ground
their pelvises against her leather sandal,
stuporous with misdirected lust—
How strange that she
is talking to me about sex
in this casual way. She’s returning to her roots

as a child who lived among
unmannered beasts. And I, through hearing her words,
am returning there with her: I
am the aggressive rooster; I’m the hens
cowering behind the outhouse; I’m the much-abased,
much-abraded, Size Four shoe.


THREE SHORT POEMS ON A COMMON THEME

1.

Staring at you across the room, my body seemed composed
of nothing but eyes.

Even my mouth
watered, like an eye.

2.

I couldn’t sleep a wink all night: my brain agitated its solitude
like a washing machine

filled with copies
of your immaculate white shirt.

3.

In the morning, I went out and bought a book of your poems.
It’s a poor substitute for a straightedge, it’s true,

but you won’t
sell me your curves for any price.



Today’s poems are from Six Rivers, published by NYQ Books, copyright © 2011 by Jenna Le, and appear here today with permission from the poet.


Jenna Le was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a daughter of two Vietnam War refugees. She received a B.A. in mathematics from Harvard University and an M.D. from Columbia University. She has worked as a physician in Flushing, New York, and the Bronx, New York. Her full-length poetry collection, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), was a Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller. Her poetry, fiction, essays, book criticism, and translations of French poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as AGNI Online, Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, Measure, Pleiades, and 32 Poems.

Editor’s Note: Lyric, narrative, accessible, and unafraid, Jenna Le’s Six Rivers opens along the banks of the Perfume River, in a scene that pairs mother with sex and “horny-footed fowl.” The relationships—between mother and daughter, between ‘here’ and ‘there’—are rich and complex, with the poet embodying her mother’s past, her roots, and the “much-abased, much-abraded, Size Four shoe.” Throughout the book love and sex, personal, familial, and cultural history, healing and death are all explored as we travel with the poet along the six rivers of her life. Le allows herself to be vulnerable and imperfect, and so we relate to her, root for her, are drawn into her vivid world. A keen seer and a captivating reporter, it is no wonder that, at times, the poet feels she is “composed of nothing but eyes.” Hungry for life, hungry for love, it is no wonder that “Even [her] mouth watered, like an eye.”

Want to read more by and about Jenna Le?
NYQ Poets
Mascara Literary Review
The Nervous Breakdown
The Toronto Quarterly
Sycamore Review

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: NO

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no


from NO
By Ocean Vuong


TORSO OF AIR

Suppose you do change your life.
& the body is more than

a portion of night—sealed
with bruises. Suppose you woke

& found your shadow replaced
by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful

and gone. So you take the knife to the wall
instead. You carve & carve.

Until a coin of light appears
& you get to look in, for once,

on happiness. The eye
staring back from the other side—

waiting.



HOME WRECKER

And this is how we danced: with our mothers’
white dresses spilling from our feet, late August

turning our hands dark red. And this is how we loved:
a fifth of vodka and an afternoon in the attic, your fingers

sweeping though my hair—my hair a wildfire.
We covered our ears and your father’s tantrum turned

into heartbeats. When our lips touched the day closed
into a coffin. In the museum of the heart

there are two headless people building a burning house.
There was always the shotgun above the fireplace.

Always another hour to kill—only to beg some god
to give it back. If not the attic, the car. If not the car,

the dream. If not the boy, his clothes. If not alive,
put down the phone. Because the year is a distance

we’ve traveled in circles. Which is to say: this is how
we danced: alone in sleeping bodies. Which is to say:

This is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning
into a tongue.



Today’s poems are from NO, published by Yes Yes Books, copyright © 2013 by Ocean Vuong. “Torso of Air” previously appeared in BODY Literature, and “Home Wrecker” previously appeared in Linebreak. These poems appear here today with permission from the poet.


NO: Anyone who has already sensed that “hope is a feathered thing that dies in the Lord’s mouth,” should get their hands on NO. Honest, intimate, and brimming with lyric intensity, these stunning poems come of age with a fifth of vodka and an afternoon in an attic, with a record stuck on please, with starlight on a falling bomb. Even as Vuong leads you through every pleasure a body deserves and all the ensuing grief, these poems restore you with hope, that godforsaken thing—alive, singing along to the radio, suddenly sufficient. —Traci Brimhall, Our Lady of the Ruins


Ocean Vuong is a recipient of a 2013 Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from Kundiman, Poets House, and The Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Poems appear in Poetry, The Nation, Beloit Poetry Journal, Passages North, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. He lives in Queens, NY.


Editor’s Note: I’m just going to come right out and say this: Ocean Vuong is one of the best and most important poets writing in America today. I have not been so moved as I am by Vuong’s words since I first read Li-Young Lee. This poet has changed my life. He has renewed my belief in American poetry. That it can be emotional and heartbreaking. That is can be beautiful and full of hope. That modern American poetry can—and does—matter. In my humble opinion your poetry collection is simply not complete unless it houses both Vuong’s groundbreaking chapbook, Burnings, and his newest release from Yes Yes Books, NO.

NO is a surprisingly experimental collection, yet Vuong remains dedicated to the lyric and the narrative, guiding us through its formal twists and turns through emotive language and evocative imagery. Throughout its pages the poet intimately explores themes of love, sexuality, and belonging against a backdrop of devastating loss. It is a brilliant and beautiful collection, a true heartbreaking work of staggering genius. As the book’s publisher did when reading through the manuscript for the first time, when Ocean Vuong says NO to you, be prepared to say “Yes Yes!”


Want to see more from Ocean Vuong?
Buy NO from Yes Yes
The Poetry Foundation
Interview in The Well & Often Reader
Ben Lerner on mentoring Ocean Vuong, Brooklyn College