Paperbag Journal

I’m tuckered out after a long riverside walk!! So much to see and so much to sniff out here!

Distinct from attention or awareness, surveillance is often most what it does while seeming not to. This is akin to the help of the guest uninvited, like the gift you must accept, the apology unspoken, instilled unspoken in the architectures, arranging the arrogance of architectures—and as Ashbery puts it, “There is no end to his / Dislike, the accurate one.” Well, Hilliard’s precision is complete lyric hell-raising, and their poems are love songs you must rid yourself of your own tyrants to hear. They speak both truth and sense where extractive power can’t so easily peer in and name the spirit any other than each utterance the spirit’s spoken. They praise—and move to the measure of—not only the self but the myriads of, and just like that, there can be no intruder, no hurtmonger, no miscreant, no bodies denied beauty again.

Dip from your day for a moment or so and get emboldened with more from Issue No. 14!

Amid moods of hustler and bureaucrat, occur poems of great connectedness. But not all connections coexist; not all linkage leads to open lines, and McFadzean’s verse, formalist at heart, weaves its tensions and its intimacies according to that understanding. Endearingly, though, there’s faint expectation of agreement—because this is a poetry that knows you do what you can and sometimes cutting loose is all you can manage.

Head on over to the bio for more from Issue No. 14!