Angie’s Reviews > Poetry Foundation Magazine, January 2020 > Status Update

....Perceptible matter goes a long
way toward explaining the universe, but never far enough.
That is why mammals engage in breath, ceramics, politics.
We are all guests at the Festival of the Senses:
some of us blindfolded, some of us the dispensers of blindfolds.

Really like Christopher Spaide’s “LACK”

Sure seems like IKEA schemes to keep me furnished
with neediness, snagged by the cuff on greed’s unvarnished
and snarling wood grain....

Some good lines, but nothing connected.

The Christian Wiman is great, the C.L. O’Dell nonsensical, and Jenny Zhang’s crude language gets in the way of meaning for me.

“...
Our skin’s inscripted with what nature knows.
The dead child chiseled in the woman’s cheek,
the battle smoldering off the old man’s brow,
Our very mirrors, friend, these aging faces
with their lines of loneliness like pressured ice:
would you have them silenced?
...”