#gail wronsky

[heart-songs]

me in my bed, half-awake, thinking of holding you. And the long thin arms of what has to be stretching from this thought-space into houses where we will sleep even farther apart.

Gail Wronsky, The Earth as Desdemona

[ukdamo]

The Moon Is in Labour

Gail Wronsky

At least she’s pretending to be,

in sisterly solidarity.

It’s not a joke, but the whole

world’s taking it badly. Meanwhile

I sit here pretending to be a flame 

in a thrown bottle. I pretend

that curved horns grow out of my ears 

when I hear of injustices. And 

meanwhile like the faint cigar 

lights of the darkened 

lounges where world leaders 

fraternize, the moon’s light glows

then fades. Her labour proves to be, 

well, laborious. Mine was too,

although this poem burst forth 

from my brain like a boot

or a god: furious.

[violettesiren]

Coatlicue, monolith,

how did you feed on the dead? How did you bring forth the moon; the sun; Tlaloc,

(my favorite) rain god of ambiguous gender Is it possible the snakes

on your skin speak a language only the dead can hear? Or is it the language

Eve heard—a sibilance of insurrection?

from Sor Juana's Last Dream by Gail Friemuth Wronsky

[llovelymoonn]

on light

franz wright circle \\ peter gizzi the outernationale: “vincent, homesick for the land of pictures” \\ gail wronsky light chaff and falling leaves or a pair of feathers \\ maggie nelson bluets 

support me

[thesefevereddays]

The Moon Is in Labor

By Gail Wronsky

At least she’s pretending to be,

in sisterly solidarity.

It’s not a joke, but the whole

world’s taking it badly. Meanwhile

I sit here pretending to be a flame

in a thrown bottle. I pretend

that curved horns grow out of my ears

when I hear of injustices. And

meanwhile like the faint cigar

lights of the darkened

lounges where world leaders

fraternize, the moon’s light glows

then fades. Her labor proves to be,

well, laborious. Mine was too,

although this poem burst forth

from my brain like a boot

or a god: furious

[classicsandschmassics]

Please consider supporting my reviews on Patreon!

[bedlund]

still thinking about lamp.

Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise -The Avett Brothers / 13x05 / Map of the World - Seperis / 15x10 / Light chaff and falling leaves or a pair of feathers - Gail Wronsky

[finishinglinepress]

FLP ANTHOLOGY OF THE DAY: COVID, Isolation & Hope: Artists Respond to the Pandemic edited by Rafael Alvarado, Consuelo G. Flores and Richard Modiano

TO ORDER GO TO: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/covid-isolation-hope-edited-by-rafael-alvarado-consuelo-flores-and-richard-modiano/

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR COVID, Isolation & Hope: Artists Respond to the Pandemic edited by Rafael Alvarado, Consuelo G. Flores and Richard Modiano

“This collection of poetry from during the Pandemic is healing. The humor heals. The insight. The dread. The hope. Poetry is good medicine right now.”

–Luis J. Rodriguez, Los Angeles Poet Laureate (2013-2016), author of From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys & Imaginings of a Native Xicanx Writer.

“A bulletin from the volatile waiting room that is 2020 to now, this anthology trembles with anxiety, anger, sorrow, and—at times—the most bitter pleasure. The writers / photographers assembled here jostle elbows and speak unmasked on pages that fold them into each other’s faces, homes, and grief. It’s a terrible grace that these artists cross such vast social distances to cut so close to the bone, that they set down to reckon with a time many can’t wait to forget.”

–Douglas Kearney

“From Wang Ping’s moving story of a doctor and a COVID patient in Wuhan, to Kim Dower’s plucky courage in the face of isolation, to the music of Amélie Frank’s pantoum, this anthology is full of candor, grace, insight, and good humor. But mostly it is full of poetry, “the only form of speech we have that meets this need to acknowledge that we are more than unemployment statistics and death tolls” (Victor Infante). What but poetry to help us come to terms with how extraordinary the ordinary things in our lives have become? What but poetry to remind us that though we “shelter in space/like the stars” (Luis CuahtémocBerriozabal), “the baby still needs to be fed” (Aqueila M. Lewis-Ross). Life, for the fortunate of us, has gone on, but this historical moment will be remembered always. I am delighted that this anthology of COVID poems will be there to make sure it is remembered in all its beautiful humanity.”

–Gail Wronsky

Full-lenth, paper

RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY

Please share/please repost [PROMO]#flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #isolation #hope #prose #verse #poetry #art

[evelynmcdonnell]

Upset

I’ve been getting a feeling lately I haven’t had in ages, that girl-power feeling. Yesterday it was as if a cherry bomb exploded all over LMU, my place of enslaveemployment. Women were running the show all over the Queens of Noise Faculty Pub Night, from librarians bringing the noise — not shushing — to the girl DJs of KXLU, “hackers” of the event. And then there was me, spreading the gospel of the Runaways one more time — my last scheduled appearance promoting Queens of Noise. The nine-month tour ended with a shebang, with all-female supergroup Upset performing live on the bluff outside the library, as the sun set behind them. As one of those radio divas, McAllister of the great ginecore show She Rocks, said in a Twitter hashtag: #ladiesrulethistown.

Azalia Snail and Evelyn McDonnell

The whole amazing night was put together by the library’s Jamie Hazlitt, one of the many super-rad book workers there. LMU’s own blue-haired punk poet Gail Wronsky gave me a lovely introduction. Then,  I said a few words. It was awesome and intimidating to have skin-pounder Patty Schemel in the audience as I talked about Sandy West’s biceps, reassuring to see the friendly faces of loveydoveryrocker Azalia Snail, colleagues, and students. McAllister — who told me Gail had been one of her favorite teachers at LMU — asked me some whip-smart questions. Then, sadly leaving our booze behind, everyone went outside to hear another KXLU queen — Harmony, half of the soon-to-be-superstar band Girlpool and a former student of mine — play some classic girl punk rock tunes.

Dean of the Library Kristine Brancolini made the whole thing possible, as did KXLU’s Lydia Ammasova and Mukta Mohan and the library’s Carol Raby and Ray Andrade.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

#gallery-0-5-slideshow .slideshow-slide img { max-height: 410px; /* Emulate max-height in IE 6 */ _height: expression(this.scrollHeight >= 410 ? '410px' : 'auto'); } #ladiesrulethistown I've been getting a feeling lately I haven't had in ages, that girl-power feeling. Yesterday it was as if a cherry bomb exploded all over LMU, my place of…

[skylightbooks]

Friday, October 11th at Skylight Books

[violettesiren]

Día de los Muertos

What can be said except—I want to lie with you for a long time, skull-to-skull, my sugar bridegroom.

Our hands are just bones now; our jewelry has all dropped off! And mi ropa de novia— nothing but soured satin, brown-edged lace. Our colonial aspirations!

Your grin is so fixed, calavera. It is one of the things I admire most about you in my contemplating-eternity mode, or when one bony finger (yours? mine?) articulates a languid circle in the shallows just below my pelvic hollow.

I Died For Beauty by Gail Wronsky

[sunlightthroughwater]

Light chaff and falling leaves or a pair of feathers on the ground can spook a horse who won’t flinch when faced with a backhoe or a pack of Harleys. I call it “horse ophthalmology,” because it is a different kind of system— not celestial, necessarily, but vision in which the small, the wispy, the lightly lifted or stirring threads of existence excite more fear than louder and larger bodies do. It’s Matthew who said that the light of the body is the eye, and that if the eye is healthy the whole body will be full of light. Maybe in this case “light” can also mean “lightness.” With my eyes of corrupted and corruptible flesh I’m afraid I see mostly darkness by which I mean heaviness. How great is that darkness? Not as great as the inner weightlessness of horses whose eyes perceive, correctly I believe, the threat of annihilation in every windblown dust mote of malignant life. All these years I’ve been watching out warily in obvious places (in bars, in wars, in night cities and nightmares, on furious seas). Yet what’s been trying to destroy me has lain hidden inside friendly-seeming breezes, behind soft music, beneath the carpet of small things one can barely see. The eye is also a lamp, says Matthew, a giver of light, bestower of incandescent honey, which I will pour more cautiously over the courses I travel from now on. What’s that whisper? Just the delicate sweeping away of somebody’s life.

~  Gail Wronsky, “Light chaff and falling leaves or a pair of feathers” from Poetry

[rabbit-light]

Light chaff and falling leaves or a pair of feathers

on the ground can spook a horse who won’t flinch when faced with a backhoe or a pack of Harleys. I call it “horse ophthalmology,” because it is a different kind of system— not celestial, necessarily, but vision in which the small, the wispy, the lightly lifted or stirring threads of existence excite more fear than louder and larger bodies do. It’s Matthew who said that the light of the body is the eye, and that if the eye is healthy the whole body will be full of light. Maybe in this case “light” can also mean “lightness.” With my eyes of corrupted and corruptible flesh I’m afraid I see mostly darkness by which I mean heaviness. How great is that darkness? Not as great as the inner weightlessness of horses whose eyes perceive, correctly I believe, the threat of annihilation in every windblown dust mote of malignant life. All these years I’ve been watching out warily in obvious places (in bars, in wars, in night cities and nightmares, on furious seas). Yet what’s been trying to destroy me has lain hidden inside friendly-seeming breezes, behind soft music, beneath the carpet of small things one can barely see. The eye is also a lamp, says Matthew, a giver of light, bestower of incandescent honey, which I will pour more cautiously over the courses I travel from now on. What’s that whisper? Just the delicate sweeping away of somebody’s life.

Gail Wronsky

[hypocrite-lecteur]

from Light chaff and falling leaves or a pair of feathers" "on the ground can spook a horse who won't flinch when faced with a backhoe or a pack of Harleys. I call it "horse ophthalmology," because it is a different kind of system-- not celestial, necessarily, but vision in which the small, the wispy, the lightly lifted or stirring threads of existence excite more fear than louder and larger bodies do. [...] the inner weightlessness of horses whose eyes perceive, correctly I believe, the threat of annihilation in every windblown dust mote of malignant life. All these years I've been watching out warily in obvious places (in bars, in wars, in night cities and nightmares, on furious seas). Yet what's been trying to destroy me has lain hidden inside friendly-seeming breezes, behind soft music, beneath the carpet of small things one can barely see." --Gail Wronsky

[finishinglinepress]

FINISHING LINE PRESS BOOK OF THE DAY:

Still I am Pushing by Candice M. Kelsey

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/still-i-am-pushing-by-candice-kelsey/

RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY

CANDICE KELSEY‘s first book explored adolescent identity in the age of social media and was recognized as an Amazon.com Top Ten Parenting Book in 2007. Her poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, The Cortland Review, North Dakota Quarterly and many other journals. A finalist for Poetry Quarterly’s Rebecca Lard Award, Candice’s creative nonfiction was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She is an educator of 20 years’ standing, devoted to working with young writers. An Ohio native, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Still I am Pushing by Candice M. Kelsey

What a stunning , sobering and heartbreaking collection this is. These poems, constellating around the speaker’s relationship with her mother, are extraordinary reflections on a past that seemed intent upon demeaning misjudgments and willful misunderstandings. These powerful poems gather, one by one, into a lyrical and triumphant confrontation with the ghosts of that past. This is a book every mother, every daughter will want to read.

–David St. John, Author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems

Still I am Pushing, Candice Kelsey’s debut poetry collection, is remarkable for the unflinching eye it casts on daughterhood and motherhood, on the terrors and, sometimes, beauties of childhood, on the complexities of our bodied lives. In intense and clear vignettes with structural allusions to classic literature, Kelsey mines the depths of her life, and by association our own lives. As she writes: “steaming/inside every bone cold plate I bury/in the cupboard/ my mother, every mother.” This is a remarkable first book—powerful and wise.

–Gail Wronsky, Author of Imperfect Pastorals

This skillfully crafted collection both aches with struggle and shines with strength. In Still I Am Pushing, Candice Kelsey‘s spare, haunting, and lyrical voice explores the shadowy spaces between mother and daughter, self and mirror, body and breath. This collection sings.

–Marya Hornbacher, Author of Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

PREORDER YOUR COPY TODAY

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/still-i-am-pushing-by-candice-kelsey/ #poets #poetry #poetrybooks #poems

[ecantwell]

"What Is It That Slows The Lingering Nights," by Gail Wronsky

As I lift my face a thick dew settles on it.  On top of that wind scatters grains of silver sand that flicker like stars so that my face becomes a small reflection of the sky facing the real sky, suggesting a possibility of infinite correspondence and depth, of an undifferentiated cosmos in which I am not I but am everything.  Like all intimations of immortality this takes only a minute.  After that I drink a luminous beer and shoo a blackbird from my japanese maple.  Black feathers fall through scarlet leaves inside a glow from window light.  And then there's the insect nightmare, and a great ocean wave rearing up in the panic of three o'clock, some bothersome recriminations from a rustled curtain, a cup of subtle tea, decisions to be made about the newly arrived fleet of small lapis carvings, and so on.  Tomorrow still as unimaginable as the Galapagos, farther away than even worry can carry.

__________________

from the latest issue of Pool.