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“They await counterintelligence / transmissions from our laptops / and our blue teeth, await word / of humanity’s critical mass, / our ripening.” Kyle Dargan’s poem “The Robots Are Coming” is brought to life in this animated Motionpoems film by Julia Iverson. Dargan’s new poetry collection, Anagnorisis (TriQuarterly Books, 2018), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Now, you are a haze, your body turned to watercolor…. You were always more than metal; you were the dream of the thousands of scientists who built you,” muses science writer Shannon Stirone in her National Geographic essay “Dear Cassini: Why the Saturn Spacecraft Brings Me to Tears.” The essay is a farewell letter to NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which ended its decades of exploration last year with a deliberate plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere. Taking inspiration from the emotional lyricism of Stirone’s sentiments, write a poem to an object of global importance that is now long gone, starting with the phrase “You were always more than….”
“I find that poems in my head become louder when everything is quiet.” —Emily Jungmin Yoon, author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species
Haruki Murakami withdraws his nomination for the alternative Nobel Prize; Ian Buruma on his decision to publish Jian Ghomeshi; imagined Tinder exchanges between literature’s great couples; and other news.
The Jane Austen Pineapple Appreciation Society; Mark Tauber to lead new nonfiction imprint at Chronicle Books; the growth of Chinese American literature; and other news.
Bob Woodward’s Fear has already sold 1 million copies; romance novelist charged with killing husband; the fight over Franz Kafka’s manuscripts; and other news.
“My small and eager darlings / what it must be like / to have the sound for love / and the sound for fear / be a matter of pitch...” Poet, essayist, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib reads his poem “For the Dogs Who Barked at Me on Sidewalks in Connecticut” and a poem inspired by a Radiohead song at Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City as part of the Mission Creek Live Series.
Gary Shteyngart on “one of the most unexpected and crushing lines in fiction”; Whiting Foundation expands its annual literary magazine prizes; Ron Charles takes down James Frey’s Katerina; and other news.
Saint Rita’s Traveling Bookstore; the ultimate round-up of Fall 2018 books; books everyone lies about having read; and other news.
Earlier this month a fire blazed through the National Museum of Brazil, endangering and destroying a significant portion of the collection of over twenty million artifacts carefully accumulated since the museum’s founding in 1818. One of the museum’s curators reported that the entire entomology and arachnology collections, most of the mollusk collection, and around seven hundred Egyptian artifacts were destroyed. Browse through some of the photos of the museum’s collections, and choosing one object, write a poem that considers the loss of this irreplaceable artifact. You might decide to research more into its history, or simply let your imagination lead the way.
