Every poet is so different—their language and their grammars so uniquely their own—that while there are usually threads connecting them to others, what attracts a reader to a particular poet’s book is a response as sui generis as the poet’s to the world.

Language of posture,
of morals: upright, good
and crooked, bad. Think:
when is it that the body curves

Love like loaves and fishes. Wine for a wedding.

Rachel Neve-Midbar’s debut book of poetry, Salaam of Birds, is a fundamental reckoning between the intensity of life in Israel and the earthy beauty of the desert: water, sand, flowers, fruit. The poems within the collection speak to the transformation that comes from holding disparate elements that comprise a homeland like the Jewish state.

Here’s the morning again saying, look, the sun is in the trees,

earth’s hair tangled birded—

the garden a hive wound with color, dressed with names:

dill, cabbage, mustard, phlox, echeveria, aeonium—

Our family was young, the house old, the backyard scorched and empty. We were broke from the down-payment, the legal fees, but we wanted beauty. We found a sugar maple left over from last year, marked down.

Now, how many Russian novels in translation have you read this past year?
- Audre Lorde (“Notes from a Trip to Russia,” 1976)

The line above is the closing sentence of Audre Lorde’s “Notes from a Trip to Russia,” the opening essay in her renowned Sister Outsider. This essay was written during her two-week trip to Russia and Uzbekistan in 1976, before the dissolution of the USSR.

Vermont poet Michael Metivier speaks with Vermont novelist Makenna Goodman about her debut, The Shame (Milkweed, 2020). With humor and vivacity, the book charts the internal struggles of its narrator, Alma.

Good Friday

Smoke alarm, you rouse me
to the dark, my thoughts
like crowds outside my door.