It was all a bullfight in the end—/The smell of death contends/With rain, and more blood than/We can measure or imagine is/Surrounded by spinning black/Umbrellas—

Has it been forgotten that Narcissus & Echo is a love story?

The wind howls against the trailer’s tin walls. 

“You’re not special,” he says. “You’re not the main character.”

Then who is? But he doesn’t read fiction.

After the Snake, the title of which evokes another Fall, is a haunting meditation on the apocalyptic landscapes that – if like Dun we have the courage to look at them – lie smoking on the boundaries of our consciousness.

“I'll begin with setting up the image…” Greg Gerke reflects on a shot in Carlos Reygadas’s Japón

What if I said / I will never / talk to stone / brush grown to a golden / edge needs sing all night / who care?

Barry Schwabsky brings us Alberto Savinio's memories of the poet and painter Max Jacob.

In my solitude / I’m stripped bare, but now / you’re here too, to some degree.

When the class that, unbeknownst to our age, we continue to attend, truly reaches its end, night falls on the self. What’s the use of clarifying it, full of tears?

“Ah, but what if we — [gestures at the ‘painting’] what if it — were to invite nonsense…embrace nonsense…produce nonsense…even mean nonsense?”

An excerpt from Losarc Raal’s quasi-novella No Material, forthcoming from Black Sun Lit in 2023

Sometimes, when the origin of ideas of the sublime and the beautiful / are struck by lightning, I root into the hail of stones / at the precise center of the world / and sink into that dust.

To simply be a part of the changing afternoon light  The old man I see / in my visions is composed of all the days / in between  Your sense/awareness of who you are cannot be confined within / language  You go up to Medicine Bow / and open the sky and step through

A selection from Bret Schneider’s poetry cycle, Poems of the Drone Years

Better a handful / of calm than / two of clutching / at the wind….

Two new poems by Joel Newberger, read at the Caesura issue 1 event.

Then, early one morning, as the night was thinning out; as — like a ball of alms rice whitened with yogurt in the hand of the mendicant called Time; like a lump of foam on the dark river of the night sky; like a fragment of the celestial nymph Menakā’s white crystal nail file; dappled as beautifully as a honeycomb

By the light of Psalm 151, we ask, what poet, writing now, is so ready for catastrophe as Rachel Blau DuPlessis? What living poet can so masterfully take up the Lurianic myth of the Breaking of the Vessels, do justice to its imaginative drama, fathom its complexities with an acute historical and critical awareness, yet sing this tale in a way that is both true to our secular moment, and true to the spiritual agonies at the heart of any such shattering as the tale tells.

Maybe now finally ink begins to flow into the nib of this Platignum calligraphy fountain pen I have not used probably since 1985. Yes maybe now finally. Maybe now. Maybe finally.

Excerpt from Jean Paul Richter’s 1797 novel Flower-, Fruit-, and Thorn-Pieces introduced by Brandon Bien.