The Age of Pleasure

Derrick Austin
If elegance be "concentrated sensibility for pleasure despite terror," you wrote in the black notebook with gold cranes your mother gave you. You gave him a vase of star jasmine.
from the journal The Sewanee Review

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems.

In Ecopoetry Now, invited poets engage in an ecopoetic conversation across borders. In poems and poetics statements, their work describes important local differences, including bioregion and language, as well as a shared concern for the Earth. We hope to highlight poetry’s integral role in creating and sustaining a broadly ecological imagination that is most alive when biologically, culturally, and linguistically diverse.

M. W. Jaeggle on "Wrack Line"
Photo: M. W. Jaeggle
M. W. Jaeggle
He wants to have a name ready for the music that will appear when bottle glass, once shard but now a rounded green, is juggled between their clicking chopstick beaks.
CAConrad
                                            I am a helio                                          whore hunting                                          for the deeper                                           penetration of light
Li Yu (translated from the Chinese by Arthur Sze)
it is the sorrow of parting, another strange flavor in the heart.
Nora Treatbaby
recall prayer, how our legacy is of tying it to a post in the desert and abandoning it.                                                               O flag                                                               so stupid                                                               a gash in the                                                               sky falling                                                               forever
Brittany Rogers
I ignore the kids' slinky arms. The dishes. They daddy. Tonight I rush to the rink with my best friend, her fingers locked into mine. The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under summer's breath. I forget to take pictures, but trust. We fine.

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