I have been the poetry editor at DIALOGIST since 2016. Working with Michael Loruss, the founder and managing editor, over the past several years has been one of the great lights in my life in poetry. Together, we have published and promoted many challenging, beautiful, wild, and necessary poems.
I love every poem we publish, and I am always amazed by the quality of the submissions we receive. We’ve been publishing a poem a week since 2019. Here are links to 10 poems I can’t live without (listed in no particular order). Below each poem, I’ve provided a short note on what I love about it. An audio recording by the poet accompanies most of the poems.
Check these poems out and look at our archives here.
To all the poets we’ve published over the last five years, thank you for sending us such brilliant work.
1) “Brazo” by Darren Donate
Note: The poem includes some disturbing photographic images of an injury (the poem is about the poet’s father, whose arm was injured doing factory work). It's such an amazing poem, reminiscent of Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, in some aspects of its concrete/visual grammar. It’s an incredible poem about immigration, labor, family, and notions of national belonging.
2) “[Circumcise my heart, o genderqueer God.]” by Elana Lev Friedland
This heady sonnet, in direct dialogue with poems by John Donne and Meg Day, completely rends me every time I read it. This poem maps all types of kinships and identifications with a fluidity and grace that is unforgettable. I can’t wait until Friedland has a full-length collection.
3) “Your Quaint Conceit” by Alina Stefanescu
Roethke woke to sleep and took his waking slow. Stefanescu begins this poem: “I wake to cheap ontology.” What follows exhilarates and challenges. I’ve read Stefanescu’s poetry in other journals and when I see her name, I always know I’m going to love the poem I’m about to read. Consider the fifth stanza: “To appease is not apostrophe / but a rich bisque of climax, the cauldron / of yearn kept stirred.” See what I mean.
4) “Grief box” by Katie Richards
This long ambitious poem about motherhood, suburbia, and suicidal ideation, is imbued with the spirit of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. “Grief box” is a tour de force, a virtuoso performance that will haunt you.
5) “sermon” by Shaina Phenix
In this poem, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye collides with The Gospel According to Matthew to spectacular effect. Phenix explores the intersections between race, misogyny, and religion with great intelligence and with profound lyricism.
6) “POEM WRITTEN ON FATHER’S DAY” by Grace Q. Song
Song’s poem, equal parts thorn and salt, is a father-daughter poem I would put side by side with “Poem For My Father” by Toi Derricotte, “How Many Times” by Marie Howe, and “In Honor Of David Anderson Brooks, My Father” by Gwendolyn Brooks. When I think of father-daughter poems, I often think of Jason Shinder’s great anthology More Light: Father & Daughter Poems: A Twentieth-Century American Selection (Harvest Books, 1993). A twenty-first century anthology of the same kind would do well to include Song’s masterful poem.
7) “He Asked What Made My Brain Do That Thing Where I End Up On the Floor With The World Ending” by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick.
I love a long expository title, and Hardwick’s title is one of the most memorable ones I’ve ever encountered. This poem is a tornado, a night-blooming cereus in a greenhouse—ample, frenetic, interior as any a journeywork of stars.
8) “sunflowers: a myth, a painting” by Michelle Donahue
This textbox prose poem elides the phenomenological approaches of Gauguin and Van Gogh. It is achingly lovely, an ear to the earth. That other poet of sunflowers, William Blake, would approve.
9) “unpeeled” by Alli Cruz
This complicated, brilliantly written poem about sex, violence, misogyny, rape culture, and young adulthood should be required reading for every college freshman across the country. I look forward to reading great poems from Cruz for many years to come.
10) “COMPLETE” by Troy Varvel
Varvel’s powerhouse exploration of stuttering would make Robert Graves’ Claudius applaud. From its first line, “COMPLETE” explodes into alterior fluencies that affirm the beauty of the speaker at the poem’s center. The poem disavows normative speech patterns and offers up a searing and original music that always undoes me.
To presume that those dead poets you seek to make bank on are in conversation with you is close to the height of insanity; they would perhaps nod in passing at your oddness, but would not tarry for a chat.
Posted by: Bill Bryant | April 25, 2021 at 10:16 AM