FOUR WAY REVIEW

An Electronic Literary Journal

Tag: Poetry

  • SEPTEMBER INTERVIEW with LIZA HUDOCK

    SEPTEMBER INTERVIEW with LIZA HUDOCK

    Addiction, death, and loss are everywhere in Liza Hudock’s debut collection, Reveille (released by Flood Editions in August), but they are not its actual subject. Instead, the poems wrestle—as near as it can be stated—with the world the speaker inhabits. Whether she turns her attention to a moth, the comparison between a pumpkin and a…

  • SEPTEMBER INTERVIEW with Julia Thacker

    SEPTEMBER INTERVIEW with Julia Thacker

    Julia Thacker’s debut collection To Wildness was recently awarded the Anthony Hecht prize by Paul Muldoon. The book makes its way through the wilds of New England, grieving the family born and buried there. To Wildness is enamored with the world of sense, yet lingers close to the realm of the dead. It is elegiac,…

  • THE BABIES by Dara Yen Elerath

    THE BABIES by Dara Yen Elerath

    I am watching the babies. The gray one in sticky pants who keeps picking his nose. The pale one with headlice, scabies and fleas. I am watching the babies. This one choking on a plastic bottle. This one talking to itself in the dark. I am hauling the babies to the park, to the library,…

  • YESTERDAY AUSTIN TOLD ME TWO SWANS by Arro Mandell

    YESTERDAY AUSTIN TOLD ME TWO SWANS by Arro Mandell

      drowned a local man for coming too close and   Thomas and I laughed but  I still think if I don’t count my teeth   they’ll be taken, can’t be careful enough out here.   Last night I stepped onto a stage heaped with dead   fish. I was looking for the right earrings…

  • PASSTHROUGH by Haley Lee

    PASSTHROUGH by Haley Lee

    After the play we talk while we wait for the C with our shoes  touching on the platform. Say,  when the magician unrolled  the sea, an old tunnel in us  burst open. Lights off, all  air – with you I believe  in water wrung from paper.  They didn’t need to use names  to make us…

  • GOLD by Kunjana Parashar

    GOLD by Kunjana Parashar

    Lately, I’ve been yearning for things: car keys, houseplants, dhurries, cubes of ice, petals, but really for something skin-deep. I keep  addressing myself as we; like I am the bull  & I am the matador. I am the prayer and  the devotee. We are prying open our mouths to sing. We are the ear and…

  • BLUE PERIOD by James O’Leary

    BLUE PERIOD by James O’Leary

      It’s 9:31 PM where the end of the city tinges the sea. An empty   spiderweb hangs motionless between the blinds & the closed window leaking   the street’s neon onto the unmade bed. No moon. Not even the comfort of wine,   bottles shaped like the body I want, & will never have.…

  • THE YEAR YOU DIED by Vasvi Kejriwal

    THE YEAR YOU DIED by Vasvi Kejriwal

      05/19:   A tornado flung a fridge into the bones of a tree.   Its bark, gnarled, like the mouth of someone, new to grief.     05/22:   I found your pen at the edge of the dresser. Yet to collect dust, it held your fading  fingermarks.     06/18:   Then, hunger…

  • TWO POEMS by Caroline Richards

    TWO POEMS by Caroline Richards

    Recovery poem with jargon   After reading Auden, I water my moth orchid with ice cubes and watch a girl with green hair draw a benzene ring in white erase. I pay attention to time. I arrange my table of books into heiroglyphs  and try to say something before the sun sets. In Midsummer Night’s…

  • TWO POEMS by Corinna Rosendahl

    TWO POEMS by Corinna Rosendahl

    from Scenes from the Seconds    It was written   for an exhibition that at the end of her life Louise Bourgeois circled back to her birth1   When I did as asked   like long hair I pulled my fire back   1Unknown   ***     Henceforth and forever I am my own…

  • PARIS by Elly Bookman

    PARIS by Elly Bookman

      At seventeen I gazed a good ten minutes at Saint Catherine Labouré’s incorruptible palms around a rosary. Soon  I’d learn to drive a manual transmission,  the backward N of the ascending gears.  The still-war had been on for more than a year,  and there was something so similarly earned  in her un-atrophied grip. I…

  • FLEVATO by Richard Siken

    FLEVATO by Richard Siken

    We are going to poison the rats, announced the Transit Authority. They had posted fliers but no one was reading them. The subway was crowded. I was late and trying to think diagonally, up and around the corners. I wasn’t used to it. I grew up in a flat land where there was no descending.…