words toward the work of others, recap, 2025 (Ghayath Almadhoun, Catherine Cobham, Katherine M. Hedeen, Victor Rodríguez Núñez, Antonio Gamoneda Evan Nicholls, Alina Ştefănescu, I.S. Jones, Danielle Chelosky, Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Darren C Demaree, Nadia Arioli, Vik Shirley)

I Have Brought You A Severed Hand
Ghayath Almadhoun
translated by Catherine Cobham
Action Books, 2025

Ghayath Almadhoun’s I Have Brought You A Severed Hand, as woundedly clocked in translation by Catherine Cobham, changes the present without using time in a verse that pours milk over disappearing and reappearing blood. It is an absolutely beautiful, howling, undisguised, and sighing work, a pilgrimage of homage, an interest earned by yearning in nostalgia’s plastic cocoon, that pays with grey ransacked vividity the debts redacted from receipts of attention. Palestine is here, then there. As is Syria, Sweden, Germany. One can feel America pretending to be here, but love is too flooded a being. Language, too, is here. A light pining for glow. You can go home again, but cannot go housed. Almadhoun writes un- and re-policed in the nonfiction of the surreal, and hesitates so quickly one might go to pieces in a photograph of the lost lost. Saying a work is necessary is currently and old-head American. If I stop here, get this book. If I don’t, do the same. 

~

Burn The Losses
poetry
Antonio Gamoneda
translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Victor Rodríguez Núñez
Action Books, 2025

Memory never has enough time. I finish reading Antonio Gamoneda’s Burn The Losses, so noiselessly translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Victor Rodríguez Núñez, and call a toast, then, to the brain of oxygen. With backstories seemingly visible to amnesiacs only, Gamoneda’s verse addresses the trivial recollections of our most urgent forgettings and de-creates in a more discreet afterlife a body plotting its revenge on any new constant restlessness. The skin is a flooded sorrow and the body agony’s breathing box. To swallow this, you’d have to believe the egg never went off and that the sadly chewed piece of gum in its yellow was real. Starve your disbelief. Starve mine. Let childhood burn me like a horse. Let this work, for what it strips from repetition, echo. 

~

EASY TIGER
Evan Nicholls
Future Tense Books, 2025

I hold that Evan Nicholls is a scholar of deep sense. In poems and retitled images of original origin, the work as pasted into the copied beginnings of Easy Tiger is one or seven of an insistent reluctance to write what came before as a prayer overheard in a chapel erected in a field leftward of the anchored fact of our uselessness. I opened my gaze to the fish-caught world. I found my hopelessness still hopeless but tenderly surrounded by the brutally beheld. I’m not sure this is absurd. Nicholls plucks from our humanness its exiled objectifications and places them on a mood board for belonging to the extracted. Collage, sure, but collage rescued from its overlooked layering. Not just anything goes. This is sorrow cooking for a sadness that’s gained an appetite in a place voided of elsewhere. This is a comet losing god’s ashes. Blood gluing itself together in a pencil dreaming of a horse trying to sleep in a tree. What angel slang. What a deadline given to forever. Ah, Barton. Easy there brother. Anyway, imagine putting your finger on all the touch in the world. Then try.

~

My Heresies
Alina Ştefănescu
Sarabande Books, 2025

Silence is a museum we enter speaking. Time is the time machine. Touch is the root that deceives the radar’s caress. This verse, grimheld. Grimheld, this verse. The decolonized vandalism of this verse. Verse as it de-translates its own final music in the pro-climactic body of Alina Ştefănescu’s My Heresies. Oh star, imagine a flare that discovers rescue. Oh humanly spun cobweb, hum dreamily our ear to betray some cocooned child orphaned of its silkworm petulance vibing while saying kill the rabbit before it makes the hole. The child, joking, of course. But we get serious. This is serious. I don’t like my death. The single question it asks is not sufficiently profane. I cannot in front of my children wear the clothes my dreamform shrinks. All sadness can be traced to surviving the inquiry. I was beheld in an egg by a bacteria enamored of cradling the belly button’s extra summoned eye. I don’t know how to learn. Curiosity, stage IV. I lose the coordinates of my surgery. An eel barters with yearning in the stomach of darkness. God is a coin dropped by time. That’s how long this lasts. By this I mean the not yet attempted circle indebted to the attended forwardness harnessed here in the fleeting searchedness of Ştefănescu’s double vision. I did at one time read books but they did not bell me to check my notifications. There’s a lot of salt in me. I don’t see myself. What I am saying isn’t important. Isn’t heard. Ştefănescu’s mirror is a thing peopled with a loneliness that impregnates everyone twice. I didn’t say much here. Leave this place where I said it. My Heresies is ongoing. Go.

~

BLOODMERCY
I.S. Jones
APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner
Copper Canyon, 2025

Ah what an urgent patience is given an anxious peace by the immediate vision of I.S. Jones as versed in holy thematics that pin nostalgia to a renamed surrounding. Our place in common is Bloodmercy, a ghost psalm that kings a father’s absence, and a landmark that earns its place with celestial hardness, wicked accuracy, and remnant reminiscence. Existence can’t solve the living. Twin butchers climb too high the tree of boredom. Bloodmercy is a work that occurs in the genesis of again. Oh how sound ages want. Oh how a mouth prays to itself to know its shape. Debone, in the reading, in the aftermath of Abel’s bent childhood of straightened witness, the belonged body. Killing doesn’t cure murder. Sisterhood is a shelter stormed by pattern. Abuse a scarecrow of bored angels. Violence leaves history to those arriving. What Jones reimagines beats us to the dream. 

~

IN WHICH I PASS OUT READING Danielle Chelosky’s ‘Pregaming Grief’

I dip my body in a paint that makes rain cry.

Alcohol is a warden.

I read re-predicted nonfiction.

I miss
my mom
with god
with god
I miss
my mom.

What if all I’ve taught my children is how
to love me.

I want to touch all the writers
in the places
numbed
by what
they read.

I watch that one movie where you pretend to be
disabled
poor
my smarter

brother.

Possessed by return

god
is unbearable.

Imaginary
bombs
imagine.

~

words toward Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi’s vernal nude painted cave angel burned wifi connected thing of a collection ‘Disintegration Made Plain and Easy’ (Piżama Press, 2025)

Dear Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, 

I wrote so many letters to Ethan Hawke. I was overweight with doom. My imagery was photographed fasting. A thorn and a spear dreamt of being on the same side of god. I have read or now am reading Disintegration Made Plain and Easy and got get super drunk. Ethan Hawke disappears in the capital of absence. I’m not funny. My joke about ache and echo never grows balls enough to go long in the tooth. Nakedness goes from person to person. I fall in love with an animal pacing outside of a theater so full of self harming children that I yearn for that future where I continue to read your book instead of reviewing every film showing at a covid porn marathon. Let’s not be sick. Am I in front of a mirror that believes in god? Anyway, into my dream comes all of my skin looking for a map might it find the blue pen that sends the devil’s blood to hell. Last night was perfectly boring. Last night was perfectly boring.    

~

Now Flourish Northern Cardinal
selected poems 2005-2025, Darren C Demaree
Small Harbor Publishing, 2025

Addiction is the breadcrumb that the body follows to wine. I don’t know what this turns into. Darren C Demaree writes inside of the southern flying vividity of awestruck nostalgias. Do you know Emily? Does anyone? I’ve been here, twice, with you. By Emily I mean say another’s name. See what happens. See what doesn’t and make a mirror to weigh the moon. Here is what I know: I stop drinking to read. The reading takes a lot from forever. Takes, enough. I’ve said it before I’ve said it, but Demaree is a writer of possessive avoidance that owns its meeting of obsessions. His faith in nowness is a verse that caves into tomorrow with crumbling’s last seed. Put sleep to sleep and the sheep to bed. Demaree’s ‘panic of the living’ will sober one to resurrection. I’ve been reading for a minute, here, in an Ohio that can age one to the closest hour. Demaree’s Now Flourish Northern Cardinal (selected poems 2005-2025, Small Harbor Publishing) is a thing that’s been a thing named by tomorrow’s animal. Leave it like Eden. Find it like nakedness. Lose it like a cloth you moved over the skin of a loved one’s cosplaying ghost. I don’t know. I call things beautiful all the time. Yet, I have no time. Now Flourish Northern Cardinal deserves the clock you’re looking at.

~

Mother Fur
Nadia Arioli
Fernwood Press, 2025

Nadia Arioli’s Mother Fur is that rare commonality that is both an interrogation of crowded stillness and a confessional written in the ghost dark of movingly lonely observation. Spiritually tactile and physically worshipful of the exhaustion that invents fatigue, it is a verse that musics itself beyond the chorus of admittance and into the recalled invitation of a witness that acts as the inner life of the photo. A work of protection and parenthetical braveries, it is full of a draining care specific enough to parent emptiness in all its bullied and stray forms.

~

THERE WILL BE NO OTHER DEER PLEASE READ VIK SHIRLEY

I tried but could not replace Vik Shirley’s deer. All darkness being the rabbit’s blindfold, I could not unsee the blur in which it went by. There is no other human I could be being so deer-deep in attending these called-off moments. Being present is not the answer. No way in deer hell does anyone love us.