Etcetera Poetry

29/01/2025

Latest post and poems from Nathan Mader!

feat. Blakean openness, Rilke and memory, Emily Dickinson and cigarette breaks, Don Paterson, Ariana Areines, The Ex-Puritan Grain Magazine - the Journal of Eclectic Writing, Fine Period Press

"What am I to do
with this lifelong
desire to dissolve
into landscape
the green mountains
of Japan the badlands
of Montana ..."

“At some point I started rereading The Duino Elegies aloud to myself as I walked in the woods near my apartment during the pandemic, and I eventually realised that I had the entire first elegy memorized. While metabolising this poem that dissolves our “too-sharp distinctions” between the livin...

13/10/2024

New post and poem from Spencer Williams:

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/spencer-williams

feat. unapologetic eros, elegy, borders, ophidiophobia, cats, Eduardo C. Corral, Hannah Bonner, David Wojnarowicz, Margaree Little, Tanya Marcuse, and Four Way Books

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/spencer-williams

“We’ve had this ongoing conversation about how boring it is to be asked questions about being both a woman who f***s and an artist, and how those two things are often conflated as somehow producing, or being involved with, the other. We want women who are bored of fu***ng, who f**k with a shrug....

29/09/2024

Etcetera Poetry is excited to welcome M. W. Jaeggle as guest editor from October 2024 through September 2025 while I take a hiatus to focus on other projects. Look for his first issue later this month!

14/08/2024

New post and poems from Lindsey Webb:

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/lindsey-webb

feat. an uncanny mirror, pan-American extractive capitalism, books that kick you out, Louise Glück, Jose Antonio Villarán, Maria Gabriela Llansol, Ecco Books, Counterpath, Deep Vellum Books, Archway Editions Ghost Proposal Rob McLennan

"[...] as if grene
could be punctured
could be stuck in whose
center could be found
the soft heart of the wood
packed with humid grene
might cave inward at the
impact the way a pile
of grass clippings collapses
under a rock thrown into
its center swallowing it"

Lindsey was rhizomed to Etcetera by Toby Altman (https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/altman)

“I think difficult subjects are sometimes best approached with self-aware, messy books, books that stretch themselves into unexpected zones and forms. Some books are too neat for their subject matter, too crafted. As someone working on a project about extraction, the size of the subject can feel o...

01/07/2024

New post and poems from Tirzah Goldenberg:

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/tirzah-goldenberg

feat. green books, collaborative imaginations, the Brontës, her grandmothers’ bookplates and marginalia, an adventure story, ‘slender evidence,’ Ronald Johnson’s cornbread recipe, seasonal books, Wordsworth country //

“I wrote her, a stranger, about the environs. / My epistle was returned.”

Rachel Ferguson, Daphne du Maurier, Ronald Johnson, Virago Press W. W. Norton & Company Verge Books

Tirzah was rhizomed to Etcetera by Cass Eddington (https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/cass-eddington)

“Books that have been loved for generations and passed down to me to love in turn hold a sacred space in my personal library—my maternal grandmother’s books in particular, for she was a bibliophile and her volumes keep coming to me (as gifts from my mom); and it is through her books, her inter...

23/05/2024

New post and poems from Susan Briante!

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/susan-briante

feat. Mexico City in the 1990s; Newark, NJ in the 1980s; stealing poetry anthologies from high school storerooms; pushing the traditional limits of the lyric; hopelessness and hope; the process of taking things mile by mile, word by word; C. D. Wright, Baraka, Sebald//

"Stars stagger out and don’t do anything. There’s a queen. There’s a node. Two hawks patrol the neighborhood trees. We are all writing the same poem, and the poem says: the ground is so uneven. This suburban street curls back on itself.";

Ecco Books, New Directions; Noemi Press

“When writing my second book, Utopia Minus, I became obsessed with landscape and cultural memory. I was taking tours in my mind. I love falling asleep somewhere over Kansas and waking up on the tarmac in San Francisco. But I also relish the process of taking things mile by mile, word by word, to n...

18/04/2024

New post and poems from Alyssa Moore!
https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/alyssa-moore
feat. calling anything and everything a poem; thinking you wanted to write a novel; gorgeous, brutal visual work; the stamina of attention and curiosity; lush, q***r ass poems; "I opened the first book and my mouth went with it"; "Young, perusing / The travel maps, the perpetual range of / Existence, I remember now as a screenshot, / A movement economy came into being."; Chelsey Minnis; Alice Notley; sadé powell; Robyn Schiff, m. mick powell. Wave Books Penguin Random House Penguin Books Ugly Duckling Presse Host Publications Ghost Proposal Tilted House

“I hesitate to call it performance, the icky connotations of that, but this text is performing in the most denotative sense. You will–I did–catch your breath at the curving, eliding, congregating, dispersing. This is a gorgeous, brutal visual work. I am so excited about this poet. I want every...

21/02/2024

New post and poems from Megan Kaminski: https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/megan-kaminski

feat. portals of transformation, embodied utterance, the thickness of place, more-than-human persons, Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe, Erín Moure (& Rukeyser & Bishop & Grimké), Ariana Benson, Camille Dungy, “neither / musician nor audience, just a person in way of its / passing from muse to siren, from source to bottling / plant, a scout for futures gone astray. When my / insides shifted restless, the outside world made way.” Milkweed Poetry University of Georgia Press, Noemi Press, A Viewing Space, KU Department of English House of Anansi Press

“It’s been about twenty years since I’ve called Virginia Beach home, and, while I didn’t think of myself as a poet when I was growing up there, the landscape of the place and the shadows of its histories are certainly imprinted deep in my memory and body. [In Black Pastoral ], Benson brings ...

26/01/2024

New post and writing from Kelly Krumrie:

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/kelly-krumrie

feat. a second-hand cat, fizzles, keeping everything still, “sand and its mechanisms”, a lot of white paintings, movements, boundaries, vision, repetition, discipline, “tile / black / black / grass,” Samuel Beckett, Clark Coolidge, Joanna Howard, Joanna Ruocco

(Grove Atlantic, City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, Sidebrow).

Kelly was recommended to Etcetera by Toby Altman (https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/altman)

“Beckett was recommended to me by the graduate student who taught my Introduction to Creative Writing class my freshman year of college, which, for those counting, was in 2002. This was after I had submitted a one-act play where two characters called Pim and Pam lobbed a ball back and forth over a...

05/01/2024

New issue and poems from Oscar Oswald!

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/oscar-oswald

feat. Moscow, Idaho, "a strange, backwards man living in a panhandle," "the category 'experimental'//"a white adobe wall," being led to the wrong conclusions by logical deduction, "a Welsh apocryphal mystic nationalistic warrior poet from the sixth century," Hart Crane, Yvor Winters, Creeley, Taliesin, the Exeter Book of Riddles University of California Press Nightboat Books University of Idaho English

"a place in depth no deeper than a spritz
out from a bottle onto skin,
a touch light contact
limb to limb"

“It’s Creeley's duty to the commons — to all that is available of emotional, intuitive perception — that pressures me and pushes me when I’m in a lull. I think he gives us the license to be people speaking in our poems not notions of people or themes of people but us with our intangibles a...

16/11/2023

New post and poems from Marty Cain

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/marty-cain

feat. drinking the poetry Kool-Aid/ acid trips, agricultural labor, spiders, and death/ small-town New Hampshire/ small-press poetry//DIY punk/ "redundancy as the empty churches/of Bloomington give way to prairie/grain elevators anatomically rupture/WET AND GOLD and SPREAD OUT like concrete bruises or/nurtured monoliths of horniness in rain as green disentangles"/ Larry Levis/B. R. Yeager / Andrea Abi-Karam/

Pitt Poetry Series Apocalypse Party Kelsey Street Press Action Books Cornell Department of Literatures in English Garden-Door Press

“I have a very clear memory of ordering Levis’s Winter Stars and walking to the campus post office to pick it up; I read a pretty big chunk of it while walking home, and by the time I got back to my dorm, I’d decided I wanted to read everything he’d written.”

14/08/2023

New post and poems by Stephen Collis, feat. "a counter-weight, a path of disturbances and disorientations" ; "material reminders" ; "some of the more beautiful melancholic prose that's ever been written" ; the middle section of Purgatory ; "no place for the / sun’s light to pass / shadow rend / the clear sky / united" ; Susan Howe, Matthew James Weigel, W. G. Sebald, Dante. New Directions Coach House Books New York Review Books Talonbooks

“When I read Black’s translation […], I noticed how much Purgatory is a poem of displacement, migration, and the search for refuge: everyone is in motion (Dante sometimes has to run alongside the shades in order to speak to them), everyone striving for the shore or the heights of the mountain ...

11/08/2023

06/06/2023

New issue from Valerie Hsiung!

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/valerie-hsiung

feat. the world's smallest slinky, "mak[ing] something heard out of something so silent," "not [being] interested in being contemporary in the slightest," "the land of foolishness and bewilderment," "the waywardness of common language,"

"in this era many believe / they do not have to suffer / shadows more than over the grass / as the walker walks over / all we have is pace / a direction / this is the style of our hunting,"

Robert Hayden, Shirley Jackson, Ma Yan

(Ugly Duckling Presse; Counterpath; Essay Press; Action Books; Cleveland State University Poetry Center)

(& don't forget you can sign up for the email newsletter on the "About" page of Etceterapoetry.com)

“Hayden writes about something that I understood in my bones, the coldness and fear and loneliness of a home, but had never talked about to anyone nor heard anyone else speak about, at least not in any way that felt real: feeling a kind of shame and then feeling a kind of shame for one’s shame. ...

30/03/2023

March issue is here! With new readings and poems from Cass Eddington: https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/cass-eddington

feat. Felicia Rose Chavez, Robert Glück, Agnes Varda, Cecelia Vicuña, 5 desks in 2 years, "messiness as a method to escape self-doubt and repetition as a method for lowering the stakes of creation," "excessive enthusiasm, a necessary dumb faith in order to imagine alternatives," "the creative resistance necessary to Western rationalism," "the quiet cipher, the engraver / wielding ink and needle in lamplight / composing in the querent’s skin / the body of a ruminant, my own mind / turning itself over and over in the folds / the quire waiting for its holes/ the singer waiting for the choir / the choir waiting for the chorus / for the performance to come together" Haymarket Books, New York Review Books, The New York Review of Books, Ugly Duckling Presse, Lighthouse Writers Workshop

“[Kempe’s] fanaticism for achieving sainthood and erotic consummation with Jesus mirrors that of Glück’s impossible (because unrequited) love for his lover L. No stranger to fanaticism (cf. a settler-colonialist pioneer ancestry based in narratives of martyrdom and self-abnegation), I recogni...

10/03/2023

We've purloined a tiny corner of the table at the AWP bookfair (1622) -- come say hi!

22/02/2023

New post and poems from Michelle Gil-Montero feat. “sounds that bounce, distort, deviate wildly from the speaker’s persona and drive to communicate,” “translation coming in and revealing limitations in the receiving literary scene,” uncannily Moure Moure’s Bueno, “a ‘tangle web webtangle,’” “Placiest places I can muster,” Lorine Niedecker, Alejandra Pizarnik, Wilson Bueno, Yvette Siegert, Erín Moure, New Directions, Nightboat Books. Michelle was recommended by previous contributor Abigail Chabitnoy!

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/michelle-gil-montero

You can also subscribe to the Etcetera Poetry email mailing list here to receive notifications over email: https://www.etceterapoetry.com/about

“As the marafona’s confessions and non-confessions cross-write the story, far more interesting than ‘what (really) happened’ are the fascinations of an interpretive universe in which contradictions pile up. I love how this piling, rather than feel futile or overwhelming-in-a-bad-way, pulls u...