On Verse
Shields: A poem founds the world it finds
Editor’s note: The following essay is excerpted from Of Silence and Song, a book of essays, fragments, and poems forthcoming from Milkweed Editions (December 2017). Reading Hesiod on the shuttle bus to the…
The authority to say anything at all
When I was a Catholic teenager, I was an altar server and reader at my parish church. Our parish priest was forward-thinking. At one Easter Vigil Mass, I played the…
Conjuring Green with Natalie Diaz
This is the drill when it comes to poetry workshops: print out enough copies of your poem, read it to a room full of strangers, and engage in a sort…
Ode to mentality; or, Poetry needs weird subjectivity
I’m working for free. I’m not a cynic. —Alan Dugan …one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. —Marianne Moore An Image for Readers “Does this poet…
Infertility Rites: Monica Youn’s Blackacre
In her previous life as an attorney, Monica Youn represented Mr. Potato Head and made the rounds explaining Citizens United to ordinary citizens. With her turn as mother, the former…
Or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying: Collaborative Writing, Motherhood, and the Atom Bomb
In Inger Christensen’s long poem Alphabet, first published in Danish in 1981, the poet cooks potatoes. And atom bombs exist. While she stands in the kitchen peeling potatoes under the…
From the Editors: the Motherhood Issue
We’re trying to think back to the origins of A. Bradstreet: We remember that I was working in the Poetry Room at Harvard. That I came by to drop off…
Imagining Mothering (excerpt)
1. A friend says motherhood is like living with your heart outside your body. This is more like science fiction than it seems at first, I decide days after we’ve…
blk/wooomen revolution: Orbiting Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker and Elizabeth Alexander
When PBS begins airing the documentary BaddDDD [i] about the life of Sonia Sanchez, it is the middle of the semester, my sixth wedding anniversary is just coming or going, my…