dead pants

It was tote Hose this morning (literally "dead pants", a German expression describing a boring time) so I went browsing through recent poems in Verse Daily’s archive. It struck me how the Black Warrior Review poems outshine most everything there over the past couple weeks.

The first one I read, Factbook, caught me with its image, then kept me afloat with its odd catalog and the idea of “manageable distance” and how it relates to the relationship in the poem. The second, Apples, invited me in with the grackles. I am a sucker for birds. But then it does more, and though I wonder about the somewhat heavy poetry of “I would say bone-light,” and “I would call it wing-sharp,” the weird departure of the third segment blew me away. Thank you. I also liked the voice and stage of the last one, Fisher King. It's buoyant, and has a nice peppery vocabulary.

These were refreshing compared with some of the other recent entries, some by name poets, which burdened me with the abstract gravity of “absence” at the outset, or plopped an lukewarm personification upon me in the first line.