Chicago Review

for Frank O’Hara the pink background separates the stencils. their poses. flat on purpose to reach ambition. most lean in with fabricated politesse to the last clean shirt—a profile in contrapposto. his face smeared. hands quiet. thighs engaged. ready to hold forth against statuary or rigid frontality or plot twists in finnish gibberish. to punctuate the fixed stars. their weights. how long their light takes to reach us. behind him, implied windows frame a city in sepia.

After Prince The voices of reason tell us how to drown the sounds of innocence like 17 million grains of salt inside our blood streams. Listen. Don’t blame me. I’m preserving the apricox in a jar made for gasoline. For throwing. Now I’m drying butterfly wings because they are the prettiest weapon against reason. Now I’m damaging my eyes and papering over the silky drawings on the wall.

In the epic-scale collection of poems Document, translated by Deborah Woodard and Roberta Antognini, Amelia Rosselli rejects the prescriptive, utilitarian language of the titular “document” and instead mobilizes the sensuous potentials of language to overwrite histories of war and fascism with an intimate, bodily account of the reverberating traumas of state violence.

hope to have appeased u by gathering leaves miss our evening walks, static chemist no charge in the air another day another architecture stands for unbecoming—a weed my belly becomes arch. for others a machine-y impulse just spit-balling here: yellow pillow w/ blue pillow and then: “do i depend on the sloughed-off skin of a snake or the empty shell of a cicada?” everyone goes to the seminar where knowledge just bleeds (a banal looking table) somebody has tricked me the reason?

I I shot my first dog when I was twenty-four. I shot the other dogs—for the forestry department, on an island off the coast of Maryland—when I was also twenty-four. My only contact with the world was a man named Dave. He told me stories on a radio. Once, I didn’t turn it on for a whole day. When I did, it played serial music. Dr. Boxer must’ve seen some value in this experience, as my application referenced it extensively.

In her 2019 monograph The Order of Forms, Anna Kornbluh defends the honor of abstraction in literary studies against the claims of the particular and the concrete: my goal is to demonstrate the generativity of thinking the political formalistically, thinking form politically, thinking criticism constructively, thinking abstractions generously.

Exactitude smothering hunts Baby kicks between us We remember nature Of adolescent nerves Mapped on To our highest imbecilities Excising the kicks Renaming the water Waking up to look At the starry glow Of satellites Cancelled in the spirit Cancelled in the gut Lambscallops Forgiven in the eternal sense Forgiven in Forgiven in the organ sense Forgiven in the maternal sense Forgiven in forgiven in Forgiven in the original sense Given forth— To sacrifice imagined debts To be willing To create...

Sometimes a book of poems eerily foresees the mood of the times. As I write, federal agents storm apartment complexes in Chicago by helicopter, breaking through doors and zip-tying residents. They spread tear gas near public schools. They detain citizen and noncitizen alike, acting first on forms of racial discrimination. On October 4, a Customs and Border Protection agent shot Marimar Martinez, who CBP officials alleged was armed and tried to run down federal officers with her car.

“Now is Night.” In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel asks us to imagine writing this sentence, since surely a “truth cannot lose anything by being written down.” But time passes, bringing us to the midday sun.

A WISH That sleep I spent the day with you I turned to you    and you turned to a girl version    verging on me of you told me        he never wants to see you again. But the next day I found your waking name startling a dark    and institutionalized corner of an Idaho storage closet. Again and again will men slay me with indifference. Slay me with indifference! That white scuddish puff — poison us, wildflower! And I, in turn,    blue.