New Poem in The Cincinnati Review (11.1) Summer 2014 - August 18, 2014

The expertly edited (and designed!) Cincinnati Review recently published my poem “The First Heartbeat” in their summer 2014 issue. (They also carried a piece in summer of 2009, issue 6.1.) A short, syllabic lyric on how the heart first starts (and is first heard), this poem took more than a little tinkering to make its syllabic stanza stand on its own two legs, a 4-4-5-3 contraption that resembles one I used in “Morning Noon, and Night.” (That one was 4-3-3-5.) There’s probably an unacknowledged tetrameter stowed away in both forms.

More excitingly, though, is the good company I’m proud to keep on this table of contents. There’s a few Saturnalia pressmates (Hadara Bar-Nadav, Martha Silano), and friends from San Francisco (Keith Ekiss), Ohio (Holly Goddard Jones), and Wisconsin (Jesse Lee Kercheval). Jesse Lee writes about her work in Spanish (which we published in Mantis 11); Doug Ramspeck (who’ll appear in Mantis 13) has a lovely poem too, as does Carl Phillips, who helped bring Other Romes into the world.