wifthing, Pattie McCarthy

"This thing needs thorns," writes Pattie McCarthy, this wife + thing submerged seamlessly in images of the quotidian daily and the reliquary past. Here, McCarthy marries the female body in its role of wife/mother to repetition, humor, and surprise unfolding on the page.

An excerpt:

it was a real word once a wifthing
has the flavor of the whole
day in her throat before she
gets out of bed she is successfully
camouflaged by her nice linens
& a wifthing's sons wake at 6.00 to watch
squirrels together on a windowsill

PATTIE McCARTHY is the author of six books of poetry: nulls (Horse Less Press, 2014), Quiet Book (Apogee Press, forthcoming), Marybones, Table Alphabetical of Hard Words, Verso, and bk of (h)rs (all from Apogee). She has several forthcoming chapbooks: scenes from the lives of my parents (Bloof Books), fifteen genre scenes (eth press), and x y z && (Ahsahta Press). She was a 2011 Pew Fellow in the Arts and had a residency at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, Nova Scotia, in summer 2013. She teaches at Temple University.

From ORDER, Dawn Lundy Martin

In the words of Fanny Howe, Dawn Lundy Martin’s poetry is “dense and deep . . . necessary, and hot on the eye.” Line, sentence, and stanza cohere in this sequence—taken from a longer series—that considers the body as site of “contained delightfulness” and terror.

An excerpt:

Order, we know, is love. Without clothes the

body feels its own flesh suddenly. To imagine fear

when it’s not present is to evoke the erotic, is to

prepare, a cool wet cloth on the body’s surface,

a cleansing, a room is tied down, a single chair as

anchor.

DAWN LUNDY MARTIN is author of A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Georgia Press, 2007), Discipline, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize (Nightboat Books: 2011), and the forthcoming Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2014). She lives in Pittsburgh, PA.

What monsoon is this, Purvi Shah

An imagistic collage of longing and language, What monsoon is this measures and mediates states of bliss, inquiry and questioning. “Here,” Shah writes, “all bodies searching for common language, an aspiration common to drench.” To match its lyric intensity, Number 20 in the WinteRed Series is also printed on gorgeous bright pink.

An excerpt:

What makes sky, sky?

Perhaps: it is descent of rain in unexpected
busts, the re-appearance of a cloud that
bears dew to balm your unsoothed soul.

Perhaps: it is the unheard song of birds you
imagine, migration of wings from one verse
to another.

PURVI SHAH is author of Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press: 2006) and winner of the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Service Award in 2008 for her work fighting violence against women. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.