Can you tell yourself a joke? Or is that like trying to tickle your own ribs—impossible to succeed, and odd to try. I ask because Andrea Cohen’s brilliant, tough new collection begins with a comedy routine played with a ghost: “I tell my mother/I’ve won the Nobel Prize.//Again? she says. Which/ discipline this time?” The […]
Recently I joined Facebook, and among the resulting friend requests were some in languages other than English and scripts other than Roman. I was struck by how quickly the network broached boundaries of space and time, introducing me to strangers across the globe in nanoseconds—even if the strangers were spammers or bots. The international scope […]
Welcome to my blog, a work in progress on the pleasures of reading and writing poetry. I planned to call it “Quartz,” after the first line of the title poem of The Hardness Scale. Blog posts aren’t polished diamonds, but they’re not meant to crumble like talc either. On the Mohs mineral hardness scale, quartz, […]
Part of Mass Poetry’s Common Threads project 2012.
The Hardness Scale by Joyce Peseroff read by Joyce Peseroff.