By Khalisa Rae
In Knee Length, poet and journalist Khalisa Rae navigates the nuances of an inherited conservative legacy. Pulling from memories of her religious upbringing and education, family history, and matrilineal teachings, Knee Length is a history reimagined and excavated—a rebellious relearning of desire and respectability, family and faith.
By Marie Ungar
“These days, I often wish I could scrape myself / out from the inside and exist as a thing / un-woman.”
By Robin Myers
In The Guest, poet and literary translator Robin Myers explores poetry translation as process, practice, vocation, meditation, and craft. Drawing both on her own projects-in-progress and the work of other translators, The Guest is a kind of diary, a thinking-out-loud about the pleasures, challenges, and decisions required—and invited—by bringing poems into another language. To do them justice and to make them new.
“his sister mentioned the mental illness that tunneled its way through the family tree, the honeycomb clusters of sisters & fathers & mothers & daughters”
Every middle of the month: new deadlines, new contests, and new opportunities for your voice to find the …
“As if sin were a banked dark in flood-lit / Chiaroscuro. As if light / were revelation, as if gesture or illumination were / truth,”
This June, Palette’s Poetry We Admire column looks at four recent poems which all engage with the theme of The Body, a site of growth, of memory, of loss and beginning, of wishes granted, left, or half-fulfilled.
I split the horizon of my body to get to the center— / a sparkly soft bellied fish, small enough / to swim in the color of your eye.
“once / having a / taste / upon the tongue that I was never able to name / I ran a mad dash / for water”