Category: landscape

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“what remains is//always, only, voice.”

“what thou lovest well/remains,”

Jorie Graham

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“What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage… What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee.”

Canto LXXXI, Ezra Pound

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Refusing to Look Away, Anahid Nersessian. A review of Killing Spree, by the poet Jorie Graham. (New York Review August 20, 2026)

If Killing Spree were merely a lament for a greener, cooler, unpoisoned planet it would still be full of beautiful poems, but it would not achieve the moral sublimity that Graham does. This is a book in which ecocide and genocide go hand in hand, as they do in real life. Several of Graham’s poems appear to be set in Gaza, where war has severely polluted the water and soil. (I say they appear to be set in Gaza although, of course, the location might also be Lebanon or Iran.) “The Zero Point” describes a father in a tent with his son just after the tent is hit by a missile. Graham addresses this father as “you” and also speaks of him in the third person, as if to remind the reader that it is only thanks to an accident of history that she is sitting somewhere in safety, reading a book of poetry, while thousands of miles away some of the world’s wealthiest nations cheerfully drop bombs on refugee camps:

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What is that springing forth,
that deep inhalation followed by
nothing.
It’s the trees. Listen to me, think of wind in trees.
Yes the drones pass over and this is their wind.
But it’s still a precious thing. A pure thing. Wind.
It will brush you as though there were leaves, as though there were trees.
When is the last time you saw trees

The Killing Spree, Jorie Graham

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I do not know how
she felt, but I keep

thinking of her—
screaming out to an empty street.

I had been asleep
when I heard a voice

screaming, Help!
and frantic, when I opened my door.

I remember her shoulders
in the faded towel I found   

before she put on my blue sweats
and white T-shirt. Call 911

please, she said.
When the officer arrived

I said, I found her there after the—
But she said,

No, that wasn’t what
happened.

What must be valued
I’m learning,

in clarity and in error,
are spaces

where
feelings are held.

Here—in a poem?
And elsewhere

Spaces, Jenny Johnson

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How to Eat an Ice-Cream Cone, L. Rust Hills (New Yorker)

“feet from one to two feet apart, body bent forward from the waist at a twenty-five-degree angle, right elbow well up, right forearm horizontal, at a level with your collarbone and about twelve inches from it. But don’t start eating yet!’

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You are the ice cream sandwich connoisseur of your generation.

Blessed are your floral shorteralls, your deeply pink fanny pack with travel-size lint roller just in case.

Level of splendiferous in your outfit: 200.

Types of invisible pain stemming from adolescent disasters in classrooms, locker rooms, & quite often Toyota Camrys: at least 10,000.

You are not a jigglypuff, not yet a wigglytuff.

Reporters & fathers call your generation “the worst.”

Which really means “queer kids who could go online & learn that queer doesn’t have to mean disaster.”

Or dead.

Instead, queer means, splendiferously, you.

& you means someone who knows that common flavors for ice cream sandwiches in Singapore include red bean, yam, & honeydew.

Your powers are great, are growing.

One day you will create an online personality quiz that also freshens the breath.

The next day you will tell your father, You were wrong to say that I had to change.

To make me promise I would. To make me promise.

& promise.

Summer, Chen Chen

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linkhut is a project that aims to revive the bookmarking flow of early Delicious.

“They describe the soul’s encounter with something hard—a thought, an event, a feeling, a pleasure or an undiluted pain—and that process of description is slow, difficult, erratic.” (AN)

My flowers are reflected
In your mind
As you are reflected in your glass.
When you look at them,
There is nothing in your mind
Except the reflections
Of my flowers.
But when I look at them
I see only the reflections
In your mind,
And not my flowers.
It is my desire
To bring roses,
And place them before you
In a white dish.

The Florist Wears Knee-Breeches, Wallace Stevens

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his poetry wants so much to belong to us—to those who know intimately why a relentless self-exposure to the world has to be made, somehow, into a virtue because otherwise it is just abuse. (AN)

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Leave the womb
Leave the fear
Leave the nest

Hit the road
Hightail it
Head the hell out

Live hidden
Without a sound

Not seen
Nor heard

Be not
From this earth
But from nothing.

Ex Nothing (Ex Nada), Cecilia Vicuña, translated from the Spanish by Rosa Alcalá

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• it is obstinate in its commitment to loving without shame or reservation.

• he remained on the hunt for nooks where impassioned and prolonged feelings of all kinds could linger and intensify, private worlds that are not really private and whose borders bleed out.

• communism is (“the land belongs to no one” and “the fruits belong to all”—Sylvain Maréchal, 1796).

Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, Anahid Nersessian

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Information delayed. Information withheld.
Saturation with info, useless and helpful blended. Plot
not “completed.” Size and significance of events
unemphatic: far too much attention paid to
tiny subjects. Option on funny noises.
Order of info homogeneous. Litotes, a Greek god,
Litotes of Lacedaemonia. Why isn’t this boring?
Do I need this info? It changes all the time,
doesn’t repeat itself, it only almost does.
What is a “conditional honorific”?
Randomness and inductive method, both at once.
“So what?” is a valuable question to ask. Frame story,
like Taming of the Shrew, but W.S. didn’t
finish the frame! A is really a pretext for B. B is what counts.

Title Not Given, Caroline Knox

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Support Structures, Céline Condorelli, 2009, Sternberg Press.