Alumni Sweater I graduated from UC Berkeley the summer of ’88 I am a crowning achievement of liberality I often wear my Berkeley sweater some thirty years after its relevance to me near as I can tell when the fabric clings to my perfect goddamn muscle daddy gym body to the rest of the world all my bullshit is rendered virtually scentless it’s a look that reads “I fuck white boys and voted for Biden”
Salt Lake Sonnet Basalt rocks, gnats, red sea, plankton, skin fried. Holy Water cafe: where blondes eat sweets. Extinction all in CAPS. All signified. Hot Dome; salt dust. Canada’s forest heats. Bible landscape. A geologist shows me some Quartzite rock—my name—also in vain. What is worth saving now; the sand, seas, Spiral Jetty & other weathervanes. Geologic time? Yet we still decay: Oil pipelines mock parks; ski lifts snark Nature Smoke; 100 degrees! More *sad face* days. Without words, we
Me and Curtis Sittenfeld. Photo by Matt Carlson. I loved playing with Barbies when I was a kid. Because it was the seventies and my mom subscribed to Ms., I was as familiar with the feminist critique of beauty standards, “girls” toys, and mandatory high heels as I was with Malibu Barbie’s intriguing tan lines. But by the backlash eighties I had a tight perm and an aching sense that feminism was history, literally. Or
How thrilling to include poems by Joy Ladin in the very first issue of LIBER. She’s a wonderful and prolific poet, with nine books and counting. Her most recent, The Book of Anna, won this year’s National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. She is also the first trans woman to be tenured at an Orthodox Jewish university, Yeshiva, in New York City. Many of Ladin’s poems are long and deal in a deeply philosophical-religious way
What a pleasure to introduce five poems by the prolific and brilliant Molly Peacock, queen of rhyme and meter, who has done so much to bring contemporary freshness and zing and a sometimes-startling intimacy to formal poetry. In this grouping, Peacock writes about the death of her husband, Joyce scholar Michael Groden, about the strains of caring for a sick and dying person, no matter how beloved, and about the beginning of a new life
We’re often told that the United States is a nation of immigrants. Historically, newcomers have been expected to be grateful and to blend into the dominant culture, and that’s what a lot of them have done. My grandparents left what is now Belarus in 1920 and made a great life for themselves in Brooklyn. Not for them Elizabeth Bishop’s question, “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” If they had stayed home,
The Virgin Mary is surely the most written, painted, sculpted, and sung-about woman in Western history, but she appears in just a few passages in the Bible—always in the context of her more famous son. Did she have more children? Did she and Joseph love each other? What did her neighbors think of her (“That Mary—she thinks she’s so special!”)? Christian tradition frames her as the perfect, sinless woman, but what does that mean, exactly?
When I accepted three of Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s poems I didn’t realize that, in different ways, they were about the dialogue of life and death. That’s a measure of her variety of tone and her skill as both a poet and a storyteller. In “To Live,” a father is killed by a cluster bomb as he protects his child with his body. (Well, there are worse ways to go, like “a bullet / to the head,
THIS ISSUE BRINGS together two poets we were thrilled to publish in the Women’s Review of Books, and they couldn’t be more different. Linda Bamber infuses her poems with a Buddhist sense of detachment—or rather, the hope of detachment, which life so often defeats. In “Nirvana,” she’s embroiled in the comedy of dailiness: a missing can opener, a visit from the plumber, computer problems, friendship problems, just . . . problems! Nirvana has never seemed
