This is the beginning. Here is where the story begins. The character is introduced—we meet the character, her, we’ll call her a her.

Spoiler alert: Jean Stafford, in her
all-but-out-of-print masterwork

As if in answer to a primordial urge,
I longed for something
to which to

It was not unlike a raccoon
when I found it by the highway.

                There was a bees’ nest over the door.
My husband sprayed it then swatted
most of it down with a broom.

“Richard could be contrary and complex, but fundamentally he was generous: he wanted more poetry in the world.”

The composer and drummer discusses working with the poet Terrance Hayes, improvising in a pandemic, and a different kind of virtuosity.

Kaveh Akbar talks to Craig Morgan Teicher about recovery, social media, and building silence into the poetry collection ‘Pilgrim Bell.’

Waiting for the future is the opposite of listening to music.

In these late paintings paint becomes corporeal, inseparable from the limbs, torsos, and disguised faces that hover across her canvases.

So many of the greats are leaving the earth in this dark time when we need them most.

In francine j. harris’s verse, Craig Morgan Teicher senses the inner-city pastorals of Lucille Clifton and the burning elegies of D. A. Powell.

On Delmore Schwartz’s “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.”“the withness of the body”The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry beating brutish one
In l…