Two Poems in the Berkeley Poetry Review

The 46th issue of the Berkeley Poetry Review is out & the design is strikingly clean, with lots of space for the poems to breathe. I’m excited to have two poems there breathing alongside work by Monica Youn, Dan Beachy-Quick, and Timothy Liu. What’s most exciting about getting a journal in the mail is discovering poets whose work I didn’t know before. I’m going to start looking for more work by Clara B. Jones, whose “Green is the Space of Mindfulness” includes lines like, “God, but one from the underclass touched me, and my mother / cowered. Black girls smell yellow leaves falling in October, but / Autumn bypasses Harlem where black girls smell nothing since // negation is not a negative force but the ground to Harlem’s figure.” And work by Anca Roncea, who writes, “every nerve is ending / what they did. what / I’m not supposed to own. their stories. / what rests / a place in-land-scape-able / vibrating at sheets of glass.” Shakthi Shrima has crafted sentences I’ll be re-reading for some time. Her two poems stand out because of lines like, “the women’s bodies / slur, they press into each other / like thumbtacks and stay.” One of her poems is pictured above. Thanks to Samantha McNichols and the whole staff!