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“...         Yes, another poem about flowers and kids. Our son thinks this one is a ball, or full of balls: like jesters’ caps with bells, one for each stem, or old pawnbrokers’ signs, the lot next door in rainy April weather dangles, and then in sunlight lifts, what he believes he ought to pluck and grasp and throw, if we would let him. Little does he know how each bud, given cues from symbiotic ants, will open up pink surface after surface, flagrant scraps of incandescent fabric coming loose like grown-ups’ lives or last month’s local news, like promises, or generosity, or overuse ...”

“... Because each year of your life amounts         to less of your lifethan the year before, the things in it change you less.Horse chestnuts, for example,         beside you in the almost-ready-for-morning frosted grassas you walk to your car, or         one horse chestnut in particular,its dry spiked ball on a flailfrom your last game of Dungeons & Dragons ...”

“... Potomac River, 1982where I grew upit was all wonderful anddefensivethe adults were kindand never neglectfulbringing fresh water andgrapes oranges and juiceand sunscreen always askingeach kid what we wouldneed or might need in theanticipated future with itsgoldenrod-borderedcleared fieldits soft blacktopits estimated yieldwe were told to look upwith reason to keeplooking forwardto a cloudless skypunctuated by dronesyou had to hideto be aloneRambutan          Honestly astonishingthe first time you see them unless you grew up with them,          they look prickly enough                    to cling to your clothing ...”

“... Everyone’s younger sibling was still in a stroller, learning to drink from a cup or put on a dress. Everyone’s mom was overseeing additions to our beige, orange and air-conditioned kitchens, choosing the tiles: cake batter, peach, mallow, rose-pink. They matched the crayons that matched our skins. Everyone’s dad was a lawyer, or else in government service ...”

“... I was not born here. But it’s here that we feel safe. Above the near- ly clear perpendicular rafters, each split sunbeam apportions its angles over the bald spots, scarves, bedazzled baseball caps, and effervescent water-features four stories under us, over the shadows a gaggle of us throw down when we dive for crumbs or popcorn nibs. So little we need ...”

“... Hyperborea after Pindar, Olympian 3 Once past the man-high teeth and the disintegrating ice that separate human lands from the gods’ secret territory, what Herakles found was nothing on first sight worth even half a breath to the sort of fortune-tellers and singers who vaunt celebrities’ pleasures, who promise new heroes the solace of willing nymphets and smooth-shouldered boys, then give them marble busts and sapphire crowns ...”

“... Tourmalines I used to collect them; they gather a charge under pressure, piezoelectric (I was proud to know the word), semi-precious when clear, pink or green; mine were half an inch thick, striated, unpopular, cheap enough to hoard. In science museums and gift shops I learned to detect them amid the stacks of greater souvenirs. At the Smithsonian’s cavernous Museum of Natural History, for example, on the first floor, to the right, in the minerals hall behind the apparently ravenous wooden T ...”

“... Epigrams, 22)Visual depictions of suicide kill.          We buried Melanie that morning;the day after, Basil died.          I don’t know what he saw,or what she did, but I know          I’ve seen too many pictures of obliviondone up as heaven –This isn’t a poem so much as a warning.          We’re going to be sad for a while ...”

“... with black-on-black pattern, two sparkly bracelets, a knit scarf and a claret lipstick. I went by Stephanie all day. I’ve been dressing up as a woman, or a girl, on select occasions, for almost two decades; I stopped for a while when I was an untenured professor, and when our children were very young, but I missed it more each year. My wife knows all about ...”

“... A ‘Mary Sue’​ is an implausibly skilful, attractive or successful protagonist who seems to be a stand-in for the author, especially in fanfiction. The term comes from Paula Smith’s parodic story ‘A Trekkie’s Tale’ (1973), originally published in a mimeographed journal for Star Trek fans. In mocking ‘Mary Sue’, Smith was not attacking fanfiction but trying to bolster its literary quality against fans who used it naively for wish fulfilment ...”

“... Lucia Perillo​ , who died on 16 October, was a poet who liked jokes. That’s not unusual in itself, but she also wrote on topics that may disgust you, or ones that you may think funny poetry ordinarily has no right to address: disease, decay, physical humiliation and several kinds of disability, among them her own. In 1988 she learned that she had multiple sclerosis; she long used a wheelchair and required help with daily tasks, and this fact can look like a thread that runs through her seven collections of poetry, even though MS itself is addressed only glancingly or indirectly, as one among many ways that bodies break down ...”

“... How often​ has a book of poetry scared you? Natalie Shapero’s third collection, Popular Longing (Copper Canyon, £12.99), with its barbs and quips and dry double meanings, suggests that life, at least in Western civilisation, is not worth living. In ‘And Stay Out’, the idea that ‘slaughter has coarsened the population’ becomes all too plausible:the only ones whomanaged to stay hale or half-wellin atrocious times were the oneswho wouldn’t share,who would tear from smallerarms damp rations and standard-issue disaster blankets – partwool, part synthetic, resistantto flame ...”

“... My brother opened thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body until it wasn’t his body anymore. That’s how​ Matthew Dickman describes the death, in 2007, of his older half-brother, Darin Hull. His loss isn’t the only topic in Matthew’s poems, or in the poems of his twin brother, Michael, but it is one for which both poets are known – widely known, in the US, as poets go ...”

“... Poetry​ from New Zealand right now often reflects the nation’s sense of itself: friendly and co-operative, gently ironic, quiet or reserved. This style has something to do with population size (4.7 million: smaller than Scotland, Ireland or Minnesota), something to do with the vicissitudes of talent and publishing, and something to do with the country’s pre-eminent creative writing programme, founded and run until 2013 at Victoria University in Wellington by the understated, reserved and deftly ironic (and also terrific) Bill Manhire ...”

“... Doppelgangbanger,​ the second collection of poems by Cortney Lamar Charleston (Haymarket, £12), describes growing up Black in white suburbia. In ‘Hip-Hop Introspective’:Kids ask what FUBU means. White girls look at meconstantly. DMX never seems to be screaming.The underground heads north on my playlistswhile an old poster peels away from the wall ...”