Red Hen Press: The Poetry Special
Hello, readers! Monica from Red Hen Press here. I’m happy to share a few poems from Red Hen’s Fall 2020 season. Enjoy!
Joshua Rivkin
Lifeguard (from Suitor)
My father is modest. He didn’t save hundreds
from drowning. Just a few dozen.
Gathered from the swell, the riptide, rough,
rough waves he carried them ashore.
Half-lit, he tells it again. The storm
against sky, the lifeguard without fear
alone in the water, the crowd
gathered to witness.
Here’s what to notice:
the danger of weather, failures
of the other people to help, we never know
what happened to the boy.
This is my humble brag, my bravado,
my foolish affection
to write the same poem year after year.
In some versions I am the lifeguard.
In others I’m drowning.
Then I’m sky. Then wave.
Joshua Rivkin is the author of Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly, a finalist for 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing.
Purchase Joshua Rivkin’s collection, Suitor, here.
Marie Tozier
Facebook: Alaska Mystery Pictures, Investigating Unknown People (from Open the Dark)
You’ve seen pictures
Of long ago—
Eskimo man, his wife
Their child,
Dressed in furs
Of seal skin and reindeer
Fancy ruff outlines
A smiling face
Dark eyes.
Illuqs looking back at you.
Your family.
They want to know
What’s been lost,
What’s missing.
You wear the same parka,
They whisper.
Dear ones, I say,
It doesn’t fit.
Marie Tozier is an Inupiaq poet whose work has been published in the Cirque and Yellow Medicine Review. She is an adjunct instructor for UAF Northwest Campus and has taught sewing, quilting, knitting and qiviut processing, and writing classes. She is also a contributor to the Anchorage Daily News. As a staff member at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, she took part in the Robert Wood Johnson Global Solutions Partnership, which allowed Tozier to visit Aotearoa (New Zealand) and learn about Māori education and culture. She also appeared on an episode of the US version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? in October 2000. She was the first Alaskan contestant to make it past the “Fastest Finger First” round and to play in the hot seat. Tozier lives in Nome, Alaska, with her husband and children.
Purchase Marie Tozier’s collection, Open the Dark, here.
Jim Peterson
THE HORSE (From The Horse Who Bears Me Away)
In the enormity of bone and flesh
that splits the night with blood and breath;
in the rising brushstroke of pastern, fetlock,
cannon bone and stifle; in the rolling sloop
of dock, croup, withers and poll,
I discover my body.
In the barrel that takes to the grip of thighs,
the flank that accepts the needling heel;
in the mane where I bury my hands at last;
in the forelock and muzzle of that long face;
in the chin groove, jaw and throat
that swallows my words like cracked oats;
in the two black eyes that glean the full circle
of horizon; in the shell-song of each ear;
in the heart, in the heart, the horse who bears me away.
Jim Peterson is the author of six collections of poetry, three chapbooks, and a novel, Paper Crown, published by Red Hen Press and recently made available on Audible. His collection The Owning Stone won Red Hen Press’s Benjamin Saltman Award for 1999. A collection of stories is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2021. Retired Coordinator of Creative Writing at Randolph College, he is on the faculty of the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Low-Res MFA Program in Creative Writing. He lives with his charismatic corgi, Mama Kilya, in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Purchase Jim Peterson’s collection The Horse Who Bears Me Away here.
Susan Ludvigson
I Want to Say Something (from Wave If You Can See Me)
I want to say something about connection,
but what come to mind are some of my mother’s
unwieldy sweaters, the yarn too loose
for the pattern, or her skills too loose
for the yarn, how sometimes they’d grow
into garments that might fit a five-hundred-pound man
and still be baggy.
This is the way I picture the universe,
an infinity of stitches, each somehow entwined
with whatever it is that makes a whole, but the pattern
impenetrable and earth herself a miniscule morsel of frizz
in an ever-expanding sleeve, the decorative whorl we’ve seen
in photos from our moon likely invisible
to anyone else in the cosmos. Each particle
of murderer, priest, child, of each extinct horse
and tortoise and bone we can’t identify, linked.
The idea that we’re part of it,
the evolving earth and all her kin
into infinity, holds me.
The stitches can all be in place, the purling
perfection, but somehow the whole
grows too large for anyone we know.
Susan Ludvigson has published ten collections of poems, most with LSU Press. She has received Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEA, Fulbright, and Witter-Bynner fellowships as well as North and South Carolina Fellowships. She represented the US at writers’ meetings in Belgium, Canada, France, and the former Yugoslavia. Journal publications include the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, Poetry, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, and Five Points. Now Professor Emerita at Winthrop University, she also served as poet-in-residence at the University of South Carolina and Appalachian State University. The Library of Congress recorded a reading of her poems in 1995. She is the former director of the Lena Miles-Wever Todd Poetry series.
Purchase Susan Ludvigson’s collection Wave If You Can See Me here.
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