Poetry
For Beth Ward
Contributor
Paul KillebrewPaul Killebrew was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, where he currently works for a judge.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Beyond Metaphor: On Prose by Chris Campanioni & Elizabeth Powell
By Kristina Marie DarlingMAR 2019 | Books
In his book The Dialogic Imagination, M. M. Bakhtin observes that “the poetic symbol presupposes the unity of a voice with which it is identical, and presupposes that such a voice is completely alone within its own discourse.
I Run My Hand Over the Race
By Taney RonigerJUNE 2020 | Critics Page
The words in my title belong to Robert Irwin. I came across them years ago in Lawrence Weschler’s much-loved book of dialogues with the artist, and since then they’ve become something of a personal shibboleth. Referring to his technique for placing bets at the track (a second vocation in which he enjoyed great success), Irwin relayed that, after carefully studying the statistics for each horse, he would forget all the facts, close his eyes, and “run his hand over the race.” I don’t think I’ve encountered a better metaphor for tacit thinking: the kind of thinking we do unconsciously, without language, with and through our bodies.
Brandon Ndife: MY ZONE
By Avram C. AlpertJUNE 2020 | ArtSeen
Even as it feels like a representation for the mass decay we experience, it is also, if only accidentally, a preservation of a time when decay still felt like a metaphor or imaginative exercise.
Blowin’ in the Wind
By Bailey TrelaMAY 2020 | Books
What’s interesting about Hurricane Season is that its prose comes with a built-in metaphor—the torturous swirl of narration is, of course, reminiscent of a hurricane. But this to-hand description slightly obscures the careful mechanisms at play in the writing, the way that pebbles of thought fall and in their falling activate other memories that carom off at odd angles, a sort of landslide of association. Hence, we witness Norma’s investigation of her body, her subsequent estrangement and from it, and her feverish misinterpretation of a breeze, which draws her back, miraculously, into a childhood memory of snow.
