Raphael Cohen reviews Schtick by Kevin Coval.
Fiction & Poetry Articles
Covering the Mirrors
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After a funeral, they were covered with black cloth, / some draped with shawls like a scalloped valance. / … anything to shroud the odd-shaped mirrors, / though sometimes a corner was exposed like a woman / whose ankle peeks forbidden from under a long skirt. A poem by Carol V. Davis.
Poetry
A Different Kind of Person
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I encounter a woman from a long way off / Almost every morning when I walk my dog / In a certain park between certain hours / That have not changed the whole season long. A poem by Stuart Dischell.
2013
Fall to Your Knees and Thank God for Your Eyesight
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the repeated words / sometimes made me think twice before / whimpering about a bruise on my knee, / or foolishly I would say the line just when she did…
2013
Translation depends, not on what must be included, but on what must not be left out
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You enter the country next door from under the stone / Church of the Redeemer / subway exit. No Pork Chinese Restaurant / and Mr. Chicken, flank the avenue / both strictly halal.
Articles
The Glittering World
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“On a night with a new moon, owls/ called, back and forth, over the house.” A poem by Arthur Sze.
Articles
Black Coffee at Noon
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“Black coffee at noon with fellow sufferers. / The bleak cups squeak in our hands. So do the chairs…” A poem by Kenneth Fields.
Articles
Postmortem
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Not counting what I can’t remember, / the closest I ever came to her was when I put my hand / inside the urn…
Articles
The Butcher
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With a smooth blade, he slit the throats of steers, / drained the blood into a bucket, salted the meat / to make it fully kosher. A poem by Carol V. Davis.
2013
Blossom Road
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I don’t know why I pulled over, idling, right before Christmas, two months of snow and
salt
plowed onto the shoulder, each squat rambler aglow, a life-size baby Jesus reborn in the
DiPasquale’s front yard,
why everything looked different, the way the woods you got lost in as a kid seem small
and disappointing when you return to them older,
because I hadn’t been out of there that long, less than a year, and as far as I could tell in
the December blur,
beyond the slight expansion of the motherhouse infirmary, where the sick nuns, most of
them retired teachers,
convalesced or passed, where I’d volunteered during study hall changing bed pans and
pouring Hawaiian Punch into paper cups,
they hadn’t renovated the spired building I’d entered day after day, my plaid jumper
becoming more ironic with each curve. How selfish it is after you leave a place to doubt that it could function without you. That it all goes on was enough to make me crack, facing the grotto
I’d stood around with my class, a hundred of us, in Easter white in another season,
singing as the May queen and her court offered flowers to the stone Virgin or just
pretending to sing.
Articles
Songs for the End of the World
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On the other side of praise / it’s time to chop down the tall tree in the ear— / enough enough with the starlit promontories—/ a nervous condition traces itself/ in lightning in the clouds, / a little requiem rattles among Coke cans / and old vegetable tins
Articles
Hartford
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City of gun shots, where Hartford Hospital on Jefferson Street employed my mother, a nurse, dressed in her white uniform with pearl buttons, and now employs me, forty five years later, a chaplain with a black shirt and a white clerical collar. Some nights when I sleep in the on-call room, I think I hear them page my mother’s elegant name, Loretta. “Trouble,” a nurse says, “Why is the city so troubled?”
2013
The Sudden Angel Affrighted Me: God Wrestling in Denise Levertov’s Life and Art
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Doubt and uncertainty for Levertov often took the form of questioning a God who could allow so much suffering and injustice in the world. There was a light in her eyes and a sense of ease in her body. It seemed to me that she had found a deep peace and an abiding sense of the presence of the divine.
2013
New Poems in an Ancient Language
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The Israeli poet Admiel Kosman shifts his voice adroitly between ancient and modern, while never seeming quite settled in either. There is a persistent restlessness; nothing is ever straightforward or taken for granted. The poems wrestle with God, spiritual practice, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the place of a poet’s work in society, the relationship between masculinity and femininity, and the baggage of tradition borne by the Hebrew language itself.
2013
A Poet’s Meditation on Force
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Army Cats
by Tom Sleigh
Graywolf Press, 2011
In Army Cats, American poet Tom Sleigh takes on the topic of the 2007 Lebanese Civil War not as an excuse for wanton journalistic rubbernecking, but as a catalyst for a series of troubled meditations on the nature of “force” within contemporary culture. Let me explain what I mean by force. To do so requires a look back at the groundbreaking work of philosopher and activist Simone Weil. Writing in the first year of World War II, in an effort to show that Hitler’s rise to power was not the anomaly that other intellectuals claimed it to be, Weil composed one of the most famous meditations on violence ever written, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force.”
Early in the essay, Weil defines what she means by “force”:
To define force—it is that x which turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to its limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.