kingsoftrain

Trish Hopkinson has authored three chapbooks and has been published in several anthologies and journals, including Tinderbox, Pretty Owl Poetry, and The Penn Review. You can follow Hopkinson on her blog where she shares information on how to write, publish, and participate in the greater poetry community at http://trishhopkinson.com/.

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CARAMBOLA

glowing golden
from my tongue
against verdant orchard
so ready-just
your slight sway
my touch loosens
heavy with nectar
you from the stem
your sweetness
am i greedy
barely held in—warm
as the charmed
as lemon beeswax
raven who filled
in polka-dot sun
its belly with you? or worse,
i imagine your passage
the brother who took
from fruit to seed
more than he could hold,
seed to fruit, the leaf
then fell, dying
& the root
from wing to sea?
pushing you
such myths nod
into lavender bells
at your ancient
the pollen calling
relation to…

monster thanks to Dd. Spungin for this review of my collection Ghost Arson:

Experiencing Barton Smock’s poetry is similar to living in a foreign country long enough to begin to understand the language.

Smock’s language is always intriguing, often foreign, more often brilliant in its ability to put images and concepts in the reader’s unsuspecting mind.

Certain poems/passages all but announce their meanings, as this from Gameshow Fatalities:

“see one of my children worrying less about suicide
and more about where it should happen. see: tub. see: easier
for a mother to clean.”

And some slide an idea into your consciousness such as this from Untitled:

“eternity
is a doll
reading
a menu, memorizing
a license plate

and doll
the first
eating disorder
in space”

Smock can shock, as well. Here, from Gestural Transportation, this standout stanza:

“the bread crumbs were eaten not by birds but…

review by George Salis of Barton Smock’s Ghost Arson:

It seems to me that a lot of modern poetry is not poetry, but simply non-fiction with line breaks, so it’s refreshing to read modern poetry from an actual poet. As he first demonstrated with infant*cinema, Smock is conscious of language, of the power of a few words, or few words, and his mostly minimalist poems have the ability to evoke endless dreamscapes. The infinite from the finite, another paradox from paradoxical poems, poems that are like alternate or anti-paracosms. For example, here is one titled “Mooon.”

moan, fossil. how do my feet look in my mother’s belly?
my heart is a pink flame / is my father’s / fingernail.
father calls me antler. I don’t know this yet. I will be
shot

by many hands.

By simply including an extra ‘o’ in the word ‘moon,’ elongating what Sir Richard Burton…