Traces (excerpt)

Samira Negrouche (translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson)
Within gestures, there’s a pileup of gestures, which I repeat. I don’t remember learning them, they entered me, by magic or necessity.
from the book Solio / Seagull Books

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems.

In Ecopoetry Now, invited poets engage in an ecopoetic conversation across borders. In poems and poetics statements, their work describes important local differences, including bioregion and language, as well as a shared concern for the Earth. We hope to highlight poetry’s integral role in creating and sustaining a broadly ecological imagination that is most alive when biologically, culturally, and linguistically diverse.

G.C. Waldrep on "A Meadowlark in Arrow Rock,  Missouri”
Photo: G.C. Waldrep
Lena Crown
Beside a young, braced tree, a bottle of wine had bled arterial streams into the dirt.
G.C. Waldrep
 The wind shot through the fence post like a knot of silk. It is directly related to light, to the Pauline                                                                  mission of light.
Ibe Liebenberg
And he has been dead so many years I barely recognize him
Sophie Bebeau
       I should be allowed to write a poem that can't fight back
Kathryn Hargett-Hsu
Feeling & being: twin pebbles passed between three shells, identical & vanishing. Everyone thought what a waste because I thought what a waste. Oh it was humiliating.

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