Dear friends,

This week, we started planning out our visit to Chicago for AWP. After some excitement, we realized I’d need to apply for a visitor’s visa, and then pretty soon found out the wait time to get an appointment is 21 months, so there goes our AWP plans down the drain. We’ll miss spending time with so many of our favorite poets. Hugging wonderful people, getting books signed, giving away books, endless conversations that make the exhausting weekend worthwhile. Alas.

Thank you for all the kind letters last week about our website. It means so much to us that our efforts into making poetry more accessible and exciting are being noticed. We want your experience of ONLY POEMS to be as easy & memorable as possible. Thank you also to one of our very kind readers who sent me Gould’s recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I write this as it plays on the vinyl player.

We’ve spent the large part of the last few weeks going through Poet of the Year submissions and are nearing the results — you should hear back anytime now! It is very exciting to do this, and also quite hard. With each submission cycle, we’ve felt we’ve received better & better poems. Shannan & I love reading shortlisted poems aloud to each other. And we find we haven’t found any formula when it comes to what we like, or what works, but are always waiting to come across work that startles us into stillness (startles isn’t really the right word), something we can’t stop thinking about. Whatever the outcome, please know we read all poems sent to us with care & attention. Thank you for trusting us with your work.

Speaking of which, we are open till the end of the month for Poet of the Week FREE subs. Send in your work here!​

May the alphabet sing to you,

​Karan​

POET OF THE WEEK Beth Gordon

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother in Asheville, NC. She is the author of several chapbooks including The Water Cycle (Variant Literature), How to Keep Things Alive (Split Rock Press) Crone (Louisiana Literature) and The First Day (Belle Point Press). Her second full-length collection, Alchemist or Arsonist, is forthcoming from Acre Books in 2027. Beth is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salve Books. Instagram, Threads and BlueSky @bethgordonpoet.

from triskaphobia

None of you will understand Sunday’s lesson: the father, son, & holy ghost. You walk towards sugar: immortal, strong-boned, & hungry.

Phobia as Poetic Device

KARAN

Your forthcoming book is titled Alchemist or Arsonist, and fire moves everywhere in these poems: self-immolation, spontaneous combustion, “a bonfire of bougainvillea” (chef’s kiss), windows closed against smoke, etc. I’m thinking of the inherent dichotomy in the title: the alchemist transmutes, the arsonist destroys. Where do you locate yourself between those two? Is writing a poem an act of transmutation or of burning something down?

BETH

The short answer is that I don’t think alchemy is different from arson. The title is from a poem in the collection. “Alchemist or arsonist: the end is the same. Something becomes something else.” For me, destruction is inevitably tied to creation. When the wren eggs hatch, the fledglings are created but the eggs are destroyed. When I’m writing, it’s definitely more of the alchemist, I admit. Writing for me is discovery, incantation, a celebration of the mystery.

CLOSING NEXT MONTH

$2000 Bob Hicok Fellowship for All Poets, Everywhere