Tag: rosemurgy

We’ve asked our authors to submit highlights from their reading this year— anything outstanding they read during the year and want to share, whether published this year or not. As a countermeasure/contrast to the typical year-end Best Of lists compiled by various mainstream media outlets (which are often linked to ad buys, or shared parent companies, o did you not know that!?), expect these personal lists to point in less expected directions. We’ll be posting our poets’ picks as they come in over the next week or two. Enjoy. —Bloof

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Catie Rosemurgy is the author of two books of poems, My Favorite Apocalypse and The Stranger Manual, both from Graywolf Press. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Pew Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the College of New Jersey. First the Burning is an excerpt from a longer book in progress, The Forthcoming Disasters of Gold River.

Bloof published First the Burning in our handmade chapbook series earlier this year (and there are only a handful of copies left). 

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This poem has been my 2018 anthem, incantation, spell, mantra:

Some Beheadings
Aditi Machado
(Nightboat Books)

Opening of “Prospekt” from Some Beheadings by Aditi Machado

Every day I wake & my life
is private. I see a sun. A coiling 
memoir. There is anaphora 
in the sun. There is a sun, 
it has brightened. A loss in this 
unyielding every day I wake—

there is privacy. A mirror 
brightens the fascist 
in me. When the speech 
is made the proscenium 
erects everyday 
theater. I make a kind 
of debris. When I speak 
the fascist in me speaks:

O countries & natives, o
wordless obeisance, o privacy
coiling in the memoir—

a great book I will write 
is not my private life. A tornado 
is simply warning for nothing
that appears out of chaos. A sun 

in the fascist, in the hard cold
private life of the citizen, I 
make a breakfast. There is a sun
still. There is a house
I move through. A bracken,
a tongue meet. 

A bracken, a tongue. 
A bracken, a tongue. 
A tongue, a tomb
I move through 
to arrive at word-like
edifice. Gingerroot,
canna, asparagus, iris. 
There is a room
I cook in. There is a 
sun outside of it. 
I empty a vase, 
I fill a bowl, 
floral notes, spice. 
The throat is a corset 
I wear, I tighten, 
from which I exude. 
I eat, I speak,
it is sexual. Prep
work, like eros, is 
in the minutiae.

Read more at Folder.