"Gioia goes on to describe what he aptly calls a 'Zen riddle of cultural sociology', wherein poetry publishing and programs proliferate on a historically unprecedented scale, while the art itself remains a 'distressingly confined phenomenon' that has all but disappeared from public view - much of it, as always, of highly questionable worth, appreciated, if at all, by only a tiny coterie of other poets..." read more...
L i - Y o u n g L e e
Interviewed by Jalina Mhyana
"I sensed, even in early childhood, an infinitely receding background to my life, a thread reaching through my heritage and beyond it. Like threading the eye of a needle, or several eyes of several needles, in fact, that line up beginning with my heart, running through my parents’ hearts, and on toward God’s own oceanic frequency..." read more...
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I think we're hungry for singularity, for those aspects of self that aren't commodifiable, can't be marketed. In an age marked by homogenization, by the manipulation of desire on a global level (the Gap in Houston is just like the Gap in Kuala Lumpur, it seems), poetry may represent the resolutely specific experience. – Mark Doty
"Who’s Who Vivid is populated with artists, philosophers and poets who say, 'I believe' and then apologize for what they believe in. The poems flirt with rogue sentimentality, only to lament the parodoxical role of the lover at a time when it is more acceptable to know than to feel." read more...
S a r a h S l o a t
Interviewed by Jalina Mhyana
"Our aupair is chatting in Ukrainian in the kitchen with a friend, the language snaps like twigs underfoot in a forest...I remember a question a perfumier once asked: 'When you turn out the lights, what is left of the most beautiful woman? Her voice and her perfume.'" read more...
Cover illustration:
Jesus portrait in German calligraphy circa 1100;
From the Medieval Torture Museum; Rothenberg, Germany.
