Chelsea Dingman

Hi friends - I have a series of photos in the new issue of the @amsterdamreview.bsky.social, described as "Monochrome Cinematic," along with an insightful descriptive essay by the editor. See it & the other fine works here
www.amsterdamreview.org/monochrome-c...

#amsterdamreview #amsterdam #photos

🙏

New poem up! Thanks to the editors @amsterdamreview.bsky.social for including my work. Follow their link to read the issue in full:

“The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

YouTube video by Kidzuko No Cats In The Library 🐱📚 | Reading Rainbow 📖 🌈 | Full Episode | @Kidzuko​

Reading Rainbow… is back! 🥹

This LeVar Burton/Reading Rainbow raised human is feeling all of the library joy. We hope your kids believe they belong in books, just like you ✨

Take a look, it’s in a book 📚🌈🦋🌌
youtu.be/gHAIjSkmnYI?...

They ruined Google search for nothing

The Shutdown That Really Means Pay Up First poll shows Americans blame Republicans

There’s a very good reason polls show Republicans are being blamed for the shutdown.

I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, w no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

Adrienne Rich

Yes. Loved seeing her poem on The Slowdown today.

❤️

Chelsea Dingman, "Microchimerism"
@chelsdingman.bsky.social

Taught John Balaban’s great poem “A Finger” to my students this morning. I can’t think of a poem that captures the immediate, terrible aftermath of living through the events of September 11th more movingly. Here it is: www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/152030...

How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart Contracted AI raters describe grueling deadlines, poor pay and opacity around work to make chatbots intelligent

“AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,” said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute…These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.”

Jorie Graham · Poem: ‘Then the Fog’

We go on.
We do not turn back.
The world becomes so small we can fit it into a handshake,
into a glance cast across the room,
a finger raised to the lips.
Everyone’s fingers are crossed behind their backs.

‘Then the Fog’, a poem by @joriegraham.bsky.social: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

BLACK BEANS Times are lean, Pretty Baby, the beans are burnt to the bottom of the battered pot. Let's make fierce love on the overstuffed hand-me-down sofa. We can burn it up, too. Our hungers will evaporate like-money. I smell your lust, not the pot burnt black with tonight's meager meal. So we can't buy flowers for our table. Our kisses are petals, our tongues caress the bloom. Who dares to tell us we are poor and powerless? We keep treasure any king would count as dear. Come on, Pretty Baby. Our souls can't be crushed like cats crossing streets too soon. Let the beans burn all night long. Our chipped water glasses are filled with wine from our loving. And the burnt black beans-caviar.

Everyone who's alive should be reading Essex Hemphill

"Who dares to tell us
we are poor and powerless? We keep treasure
any king would count as dear."

Last day of summer and reflecting on the grim weather, this came to mind. The worst that could happen me today is that I got a little bit wet. This is weather on a different scale. 'Katrina' by Patricia Smith, from Blood Dazzler

#poetry
#poemoftheday

The grasses are light brown
and ocean comes in
long shimmering lines
under the fleet from last night
which dozes now in the early morning

from "September" by Joanne Kyger
buff.ly/2BU7N9S

I don't want to beautify our collective trauma. Your sexual brilliance resided, I sometimes thought, In your ability to say, No matter the external circumstances: "I am here." From this place, you gave only this many Desiccated fucks About the future. Day by day, you discovered what happiness is. As your guest, I trained myself To beautify Our collective trauma. When night fell at last, I turned with a sigh Towards the darkness. I am about to squeeze out an egg, you Murmured As you kissed me Goodnight. Hold a funeral for the imagination, I thought.

Bhanu Kapil

To weep unbidden, to wake at night in order to weep, to wait for the whisker on the face of the clock to twitch again, moving the dumb day forward - is this merely practice? Some believe in heaven, some in rest. We'll float, you said. Afterward we'll float between two worlds- five bronze beetles stacked like spoons in one peony blossom, drugged by lust: if I came back as a bird I'd remember that— until everyone we love is safe is what you said. "Practice", from Messenger: New and Selected

Ellen Bryant Voigt

Poet Martha Silano sits outdoors with a water bottle in hand. Clear glasses, purple coat, blue jeans. Hedges and trees in the background.

Martha Silano's "Death Poem." Available online at Post Road Magazine.

Cover image for Martha Silano's posthumous poetry collection TERMINAL SURREAL. Bright pink moth rests on purple orchid.

For TERMINAL SURREAL's video trailer, we're creating a chorus of voices reflecting #MarthaSilano's influence. To participate, record yourself reading Silano's “Death Poem” w/a voice memo/recorder app on your phone & email us at business@acre-books.com for where to text the file. Due: Fri., Aug 22.

Not Yet America At the end we are marching and yelling, waving signs we inked in ourselves, just as we did when we were kids. The street never changes. Drinkers watch from a bar, suds glinting on their upper lips. A bald man is being shaved in a barbershop. The chair swivels toward us: how round those eyes are, in a face smothered under lather. A baker in a white paper bag hat stares from a doorway, poised to clap flour from his hands. Behind an iron grille, a nun sighs and crosses herself. Apparently we will always have to march, singing to keep awake, calling "peace" and "justice" as if those sibilants could answer: in the numbing cold, even in the night sky, in the empty quadrant of Scorpio. There you'll find us, and the street too, since it stretches forever. A bodega with steel gates. A Jiffy Lube. A chain-link fence on which a child has spray-painted the first stroke of the first letter of a name.

—D. Nurkse

ER S/P GSW A colleague tells me of her ER patient,

"It was starlike, the small, reflective slug
crouched in its own echolucent shine."

#TodaysPoem #poetry
ER S/P GSW by Paul Hlava Ceballos (@paulhlava.bsky.social‬) (2023 Academy of American Poets) tinyurl.com/yancmncz

Poetry Review Submissions: Paying Markets

Hi poetry reviewers, writers, readers: here’s a document I made of paying reviews markets. Holler at me if you see something that needs to be updated/deleted/added! 🙏 I would appreciate it. Would love this to be a community resource for freelance writers to be paid for their criticism.

"It's like a PhD in every field!"

"Can it reliably do college-level work, such as accurately identifying and summarizing pertinent information?"

"No."

"So what is really does is sound like an expert to people who aren't experts in that field?"

"Yeah! That's what everyone wants, right?"

Sally Rooney: I support Palestine Action. If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under UK law, so be it I would happily publish this statement in a UK newspaper – but that would now be illegal

Sally Rooney: I support Palestine Action. If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under UK law, so be it

Benefits of Drowning The light has been so awful. Not whipped as a child, I'm scared of human power. They say there is an end but I go round and round with unscrupulous desires in regions of my throat. Nests smell from neglect. Autumn will smell too if the summer wasn't good. Hard rain brings exaltation. All the little mouths come out, blowing rings of brightness. I can enter them, not stagger, not a skeleton, not plagued, not by ghosts.

Larissa Szporluk

Cover of The Brush by Eliana Hernandez-Pachon trans from Spanish by Robin Myers. Orange cover with a coal black abstract art work with orange flames/petals and white thin chains (as roots) by Cecilia Vicuna. A beautiful edition of this work by always remarkable Archipelago Books

The Witnesses resume: If we add the fact that the night entered the houses with them, the night came and went as it pleased, extending its dark sky as skin is stretched, as God covered the body of the animals with hides, if we may borrow that image, which is to say, enveloping it all, if you add the fact of the night in all its vastness and envelopment, you might come up with an idea.

The Brush continues: When the bodies collapse in the town square, picked out at random, the houses are left behind with their yards, their kitchens, their sheets pressed smooth, receiving, still, the sun's warm touch. Things are left with their layers creased into each other, asking why, this, now, things don't think before speaking, they charge ahead like old trains derailing.

For @sealeychallenge.bsky.social Day #11 The Brush (2024) by Eliana Hernandez-Pachon, Columbian poet. A striking narrative long poem, documenting a rural atrocity through different POV: witnesses, investigators, victims & nature itself. @archipelagobooks.bsky.social @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social

Herculaneum No one is bored, just barbaric Anymore. Ash admixed with rain, which cooled The air. How much longer will this beauty Of yours last? As if even the idea of the city Has been lost for twenty centuries. Don't quail like this; go Gracefully instead. Eros enters The room like a lesser god stopped still In the middle of a bath of oil & umbrage in The exquisite hour. No one is Exquisite anymore. The river is so small now It will be hard to drown In it. And still this world's a pretty one. What world.

Lucie Brock-Broido

if all that breaks our hearts is yesterday, and the silent colonnade anticipating the dynamite, if all we love is a lost world then let the dust swallow our names let the maps beneath our feet burn. If all we are is past, who are these millions noW gasping for air?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha