If you feel you’re still “finding your voice,” consider what Seamus Heaney says about his discovery of his own when he wrote the poem “Digging.” In his essay “Feeling Into Words,” he writes of it, “I had done more than make an arrangement of words; I felt that I had let down a shaft into real …
In Imago, a finely-realized first collection of poems, Manhattan-based Joseph Legaspi looks back through the gates of adulthood at an Eden-like childhood in the Philippines. But these free-verse narratives are not simple, sugar-coated, or — for all their use of the word “I” — self-centered; their delicate surfaces give way to reveal a world that …
Like any poet, I think a lot about language. It’s a way to connect with the physical world, but also to lift out of it. It’s abstract, but its source is concrete — the letters of our alphabet are based on a set of pictograms, stylized pictures used for words. Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mayan glyphs, and cuneiform …
Once, my husband and his poker buddies teased me by claiming that, earlier that summer, they’d shaved my cat one night while I was out of town. “Sure,” Steve said, going into detail about it — the “here, kitty-kitty,” the cat on his lap, the shaving cream, the towel. I smiled politely; it was cute, …