LINE LEVEL #11
Welcome to LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons from Poets of Color, a monthly column in which writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo zooms in on an element of craft from the work of BIPOC poets. LINE LEVEL unfolds in three parts:…
Category: General
Poetry: “Seventeen” by Chris Dahl
Chris Dahl’s “Seventeen,” is sensuous, the kind of luxuriating poem that takes its time as it unwinds, carrying the reader through a journey that ends in a kind of time capsule of youth, beauty, nostalgia and dreamy remembering—for both author…
Poetry: “Listening for Otters” by Jayne Marek
Jayne Marek’s “Listening for Otters,” has a restrained quality, a sense that we as readers don’t have all the information. But it’s precisely this kind of withholding that draws us into the poem. The writing is tightly controlled and sparse,…
Poetry: “What My Grandmother Nestles in the Earth” by Courtney DuChene
Courtney DuChene’s poem, “What My Grandmother Nestles in the Earth,” evokes a tension between the bursts of color that she evokes in the poem using floral imagery, and the fragility of human bodies and minds, focusing in particular on memory.…
Poetry: “I squeezed the world like a tangerine” by Ruby Maghoney
Ruby Maghoney invites us into a suddenly visceral space with the image of squeezing the tangerine, but then quickly pivots, pressing us as readers to juxtapose this deeply physical and intimate image with an immediate pivot to implications of loss…
LINE LEVEL #10
Welcome to LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons from Poets of Color, a monthly column in which writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo zooms in on an element of craft from the work of BIPOC poets. LINE LEVEL unfolds in three parts:…
Poetry: “first winter in iowa city” by Jeremy Teddy Karn
Jeremy Karn’s work in “first winter in iowa city,” initially feels tentative, as this speaker navigates the boundaries of this new relationship and the boundaries of intimacy and culture that seem to fluctuate between speaker and subject, but by the…
Poetry: “Last Date” by Sharon Zhang
In Sharon Zhang’s “Last Date,” her speaker encounters love from all angles, in a sly merging of pregaming and praxis. The writing is quick and energetic, but Zhang’s fresh voice isn’t flip or glib; rather this speaker is quite rigorous…
Poetry: “What Words Do I Not Yet Have?” by Ben Cooper
“The moon has no need for your poetry,” Ben Cooper says, and he’s right. Sometimes we have to hear difficult truths, difficult versions of the truth. But in his poem, “What Words Do I Not Yet Have,” Cooper doesn’t look…
Poetry: “I Was Reading a Scientific Article” by Mark Hernberg
Mark Hernberg knows how to tug on the heartstrings. Literally. In his poem, “I Was Reading a Scientific Article,” he moves from the metaphor into the metaphysical in just a few lines, his speaker deftly illustrating to the reader the…
