Clark Kent’s Guide to Authorship, Readership, Text, and Existence

Honestly, I’m embarrassed when somebody calls me Superman because I’m not that great and most of my heroics are egotistical acts of self-dramatization. I hate wearing tights and I eschew the red, white, and blue, although some misguided souls equateme with cold war notions of patriotism.

A giant skeleton rose from the concrete in the middle of the street. Cars pulled over. People started openly weeping.

Denenberg has woven together centuries, tangling time periods. The antiquated meeting the modern mirrors how our impact here on earth is not so easily erased. What we do now does not go away.

The Dragons, The Giant, The Women is a captivating story of Moore’s struggles with trauma, racism, self-love, and self-identification. Yet her family is its beating heart.

Dixon’s words also add to a greater discourse about what it means to see and not be seen, what it means to hunger and not be filled, and how this leads to a desiccation of body and spirit.

Chang’s simplicity is a ruse; she introduces you to a little pile of ordinary ice, and before you can register its coldness, she shatters your big barge with her bigger iceberg.

From 2012: Guest edited by Tom Williams

Sometimes an essay thinks and refers. Sometimes an essay feels like it’s among a sentence’s machineries—the form and context. Sometimes an essay stumps Dillon and he doodles.

The son of immigrants will never know

the saaundhi mitti ki khushboo that signals the arrival of the first rains of monsoons, dark clouds bursting their pent-up water on a cracked earth, the rising of the soft dust, the slurry of water and soil…

Instead of dissolving into her gray matter, these traumas and losses have risen to the surface—like the crude oil from which this record was pressed—to construct, with pain, the spillage of these poems.

In a world where only numbers have value, what space is left for selfhood? How have humans been transformed by this mechanized language?

When Katya interviewed for the job at the cloning project station, they gave her a tour of the facility.

It’s easy to become lost in these poems, watching as Chang layers alienation and longing with humor and insults; a quick taunt, a fierce left hook. Each flash of tenderness is beautiful and hard-won.

The entire section is a holy conversation within this one poet’s self. It charts a movement through grief, from fragmentation to connection.