"what answer, darling, could I think or give?"

Today's subject line is from Sandra M. Gilbert's February 11, 2003, which is one of several sonnets about love and loss in the September 2003 issue of Poetry. There seems to me more word- and form-play in this issue than usual -- another sonnet is Lisa Barnett's Love Recidivus ("the careful lives we have so far lived through..."). In James Kimbrell's poem about his West Tennessee psychic, he observes "how /she already knows / the sundry screwed up ways a day / can go days before / I park my wreck on the hill again beside / her white Mercedes," and later exclaims, "O non-refundable / life facts!" That cracks me up.

The other collection currently on my bathtub rim is Ernesto Priego's Not Even Dogs (Meritage Press, 2006), which I received as a comp(ensation) copy some time ago after writing some reviews for Galatea Resurrects. The poem I've found most striking so far is "It's always like this: no matter" (p. 51). While looking around to see if there was a copy of it online, I came across John Bloomberg-Rissman's reply to it. Garcia Lorca invocations for the win!