New Poetry with Audio!

Donald Revell
Stephen Burt
Paul Hoover
Jonah Winter
Cathy Wagner
Reginald Shepherd
Nin Andrews
Sophia Kartsonis
Sandra Miller
Joshua Harmon
Devin Johnston
Chuck Zerby
Sara Henning
Ognjen Smiljanic
Lance Phillips
Peter Drake
Kathleen Byrne
Ernest Hilbert
Garth Greenwell
Marc McKee

Criticism

Brian Henry on Kinsella
Gabriel Welsch on Northrop
Gabriel Welsch on Smith
Cecily Iddings on Ruefle
Christopher McDermott on Wenderoth

Dominique Hecq is a Belgian-born writer now living in Melbourne. Painting was initially a means of overcoming writer’s block, but is has now become vital to her work. There is an abstract gestural poetry about her paintings that is hardly surprising given the interaction between the two media in her work. Her books include The Book of Elsa, Mythfits, Magic & Other Stories, The Gaze of Silence and with Russell Grigg and Craig Smith, Female Sexuality: The Early Psychoanalytic Controversies. She is also the author of One Eye Too Many and Cakes and Pains, two short plays. Good Grief & Other Poems is her most recent collection. Noisy Blood is forthcoming.

No Hands

Fingers feel beneath crisp sheets. She waits–

in awe of ramshackle architecture,

fleshes out the curve of his desire. Watches

to see how it takes hold of him. Where it

surges from. What night. What unnameable

nothing. His hunger moves over her body

like hands. She throws herself in.

Catch-as-catch can; fight, bite, scratch–

he latches on her breast. Sucks and licks.

They kiss. Rock. Hold. Surrender–

He says their child will be patted and prodded

with affectionate indifference. She says

it’s pure wish-fulfilment on his part.

He laughs says he’s thinking of two

cockroaches impaled on a stick. She laughs,

thinks of winter comfort. The first camellias.

Last mulberries. The endless feast of being

fat with child. The pointed forgetting

of the end. The fears, agonizing and renascent.

And when he comes, she forgets it has nothing

to do with her. Hands fall on crumpled sheets.

Matting

The cool night takes all its clothes off

& on our uncropped lawn, shows off.

I shed all the things undreamed

on the blades of shadows unsung

& I listen.

The day breaks

into a ball of sounds that roll

& knock you over.

I lie on a mat of letters

like runners bristling up –

with offshoots bearing my body down.

A blade for a tongue

I recoil

& cool, make a note

for the dreaming of the night.