Poetry Month Spotlight: Ae Hee Lee

Poetry Month Spotlight

Ae Hee Lee

Artist Statement

While thinking about space/place, I was drawn to the haiku as a form of restraint and intensity. I took inspiration from Brain Mill’s call for poems that speak to space/place as well as the architecture of the page, and explored how I could also engage with the topics of connection/longing through fragmentation.

 

About Ae Hee Lee

Born in South Korea, raised in Peru, Ae Hee Lee currently lives in the United States. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks: Dear bear, (Platypus Press, 2021), Bedtime || Riverbed (Compound Press, 2017), and Connotary, which was selected as the winner for the 2021 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming at Poetry Northwest, The Georgia Review, New England Review, and Southern Review, among others. She can be found on her website: aeheeleekim.com and on Twitter @aeheelee

National Poetry Month
National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

As the pandemic has continued into its second year, we at Brain Mill are thinking about spaces & places: how we exist in space, the importance of access, and the particulars of navigating places. We have gathered together in ways that may have been new to us over the last few years, greeting each other in small squares of connectivity, developing relationship and care with virtual check-ins, follows, and voices translated via technology. In our best moments we have learned to listen; in our worst, we have been caught up by all the ways we need to do better and think more deeply about community systems and for whom entry is barred.

Editors’ Picks Week 2: Poetry by Anise Black

Editors' Picks, Week 2

Poetry by Anise Black

Powderhorn Bench

by Anise Black

 

Child sits on a worn bench
facing the omnipotent glistening lake

Sun casts hazy ripples of Mother’s back
onto the broken piles of wrinkled soil

She sorrowfully gazes past the maverick of ducklings
compliantly trailing after their Mother

Quaking

Past the mass of children joyously frolicking
on the periodic playground

Laughing

Past the disengaged couples
reverently power walking in sync

Talking

They sit on the bench until slivers of splinters
dig into Child’s bow-legged thighs

Mother descending, unraveling
underneath the plastered sky
The lake hue turning from amber to ash

Father, prematurely engulfed by the same sky
Sternly cast into a trapped mortal inferno
A sky Child knew all too well

Envisioned

Drawn in orange crayon
while Father was still alive
Coloring in the lines
wishing for his immortality

Premonition

Child comforting Mother’s silent cries
Unkept, fractured, mourning

Mother and ducklings retreat
from the ashen lake to their warm nest

Child hugs herself tightly as a chill passes
over her and between her and Mother

Father sits beside her, above her
sheltering her in the warmth
of the archaic wooden bench

His presence soothes her
as he sings her favorite song

He cradles their water stained faces
cupping dried tears with hollow burnt hands

They sit on the bench
warmly embracing the Veil

Nesting
Staring at a gloomy and spirited lake
Unkept, fractured, mourning
Unkept, fractured, mourning

Jareen Imam author photo

Anise Black is a black poetess, writer, and recovering New Yorker who now lives cozily nestled in North Carolina. Anise once wrote an epic poem dedicated to each of her ferocious, loving felines (El Gato & Layla Ali). She loves to hike in the Blue Ridge mountains, watch cooking shows, and read science fiction.

National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

As the pandemic has continued into its second year, we at Brain Mill are thinking about spaces & places: how we exist in space, the importance of access, and the particulars of navigating places. We have gathered together in ways that may have been new to us over the last few years, greeting each other in small squares of connectivity, developing relationship and care with virtual check-ins, follows, and voices translated via technology. In our best moments we have learned to listen; in our worst, we have been caught up by all the ways we need to do better and think more deeply about community systems and for whom entry is barred.

Top photo by Anthony Cantin on Unsplash

National Poetry Month Spotlight: Poetic YA Featuring Black Protagonists

National Poetry Month Spotlight: Poetic YA Featuring Black Protagonists

April is National Poetry Month, and one of the best ways to read poetry during this time is in young adult novels.

Not only are there novels in verse, but there are also books featuring poetry or lyrical writing that enhance the overall narrative. Last year, I spotlighted novels in verse by Black YA authors. Now, here are more poetic books to read to celebrate National Poetry Month.

Vinyl Moon by Mahogany L. Browne

Angel is a young woman who moves to Brooklyn after a romantic relationship hurts her. However, change can be hard when you’re far from the place and people you used to call home. Angel gradually gets to know her uncle and her classmates while discovering Black literature and a passion for creating music mixes. As time passes, Angel begins to fill the holes in her heart with friendship, family, and art.

In between chapters are poems that give you a peek into Angel’s head as she navigates the changes in her life. Some poems deal with self-doubt, while others take up thoughts on family and mindfulness. As the book progresses, you see Angel start to see herself and those around her in a whole new light. This is a tender, uplifting book that shows the how a community of friends, family, and peers is invaluable to personal healing.

 

Me, Moth by Amber McBride

After losing her family in an accident, Moth goes to live with her aunt, but she still feels alone. Soon she meets Sani, a boy with depression who is trying to figure out where he comes from. Together, the two of them take a road trip in order to find themselves and understand how each of their families’ histories shapes who they are now. This novel in verse is the debut book of Amber McBride and is considered one of the best books of 2021 by Shelf Awareness, NPR, and TIME.

 

Muted by Tami Charles

Seventeen-year-old Denver dreams of singing well enough to escape her small, white hometown. With her best friends Dali and Shak, she does just that by getting the attention of R&B star Sean “Mercury” Ellis. At first, the perks and the recording time seem worth it—until Denver starts losing her voice in more ways than one. Now, she must decide whether achieving her dream is worth the cost of being exploited.

Partly inspired by the author’s own experiences in the music industry, as well as by news stories, this novel in verse shows how friendship, family, and self-love can keep you grounded in an industry that seeks to diminish Black girls. The book’s honors include features in Essence, Marie Claire, and Bookbuzz.

 

Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam

Amal is a sixteen-year-old Black Muslim boy who, along with four other boys, is wrongfully imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. Through his gifts for poetry and visual art, Amal learns to hold onto his humanity and express the truth of what really happened to him. This is a story of how systematic racism impacts Black young men and how hard it can be to fight against it.

In addition to the talented Ibi Zoboi, the heart of this book is also written by prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five. This 2020 book is partly inspired by Yusef’s experiences as an incarcerated teen and the poetry he wrote during this time. Its accolades include being Shelf Awareness’s Best Book of the Year, a Goodreads finalist for Best Teen Book of the Year, and being a NYT best-seller.

 

Concrete Kids by Amyra León

An autobiographical novel in verse, this book tells the story of the author’s childhood as she navigates foster care, grief, and self-love. It is an inspirational book of resilience and dreams that is part of the series known as Pocket Change Collective. Pocket Change Collective consists of a series of small books by big thinkers on a variety of ideas and experiences, ranging from gender identity to Black womanhood to the plastic crisis. Concrete Kids has been an A Goddard CBC’s Social Justice Prize Nominee, as well as an A YALSA Amazing Audiobook for Young Adults.

The Afro YA promotes black young adult authors and YA books with black characters, especially those that influence Pennington, an aspiring YA author who believes that black YA readers need diverse books, creators, and stories so that they don’t have to search for their experiences like she did.

Latonya Pennington is a poet and freelance pop culture critic. Their freelance work can also be found at PRIDE, Wear Your Voice magazine, and Black Sci-fi. As a poet, they have been published in Fiyah Lit magazine, Scribes of Nyota, and Argot magazine among others.

Poetry Month Spotlight: Angela Trudell Vasquez

Poetry Month Spotlight

Angela Trudell Vasquez

Artist Statement

My work is infused with nature. I am a poet of place as much as anything. I observe the world around me, suss it out, and sculpt it on the page. I love theory and spend large amounts of time exploring the stanzas in my brain, reading, being immersed in art and in the wild. I harvest my free writes for poems quite often. Sometimes lines come to me in dreams. I write to discover what it is I am thinking. This is my way of approaching the page.

 

Space Time

 

I.

We are magic dying.

Pink peonies gasp tight ants assist open petals

no peony exists without ministrations of light

brick wall frames space between drive

a garden of red clay pots brightens balcony

all balconies lit with green light caress eyes

eyes mystery, upset images transform in skull

how we got here is fought over in courtrooms

people pretend to be god brandish fire sticks

hands tools, nails weapons

a newborn is a garden of purple heirloom potatoes

an angel reads minds from her high chair, babbles

mother feeds child smashed orange skin sweet potatoes with tiny spoon.

We are most vulnerable when we sit at the table with fork and knife.

 

 

 

II.

 

Early rose light calls from window

jack rabbits bound

flight occurs on ground.

Where are my crow friends?

Hawk brown circles school bathed in blue light

students descend stairs fade into brilliance

talks done talk begins

black pen scratches white paper

mind waxes                 sheds peacock feathers.

How do you begin to think mired in thought and self-doubt?

Walk clears canvas, blank sheets beg

pull feet to mountain ascend.

 

Because

 

The dew spools in the far corner of the pasture,
a black and white Holstein dairy cow
licks her newborn calf clean.
Her pink tongue unfolding.
Emerald field grass stripes blink.
The calf looks over the hill
past barb wire fences, inter-
state traffic, rolling green
hills and faded white farmhouses,
across the north plains
towards the coral orb,
the heat of the rising sun
for the first time…

Sobs wrench my body cavity
for all in captivity. Tears
flood my shirt.
I pull over.

Let me sit in sadness for a spell.

I need to write this out.

……….Died in her sleep.

……….Her sister threw herself in front of a truck.

……….Leaves behind three daughters.
……….Her father called her, Negrita.
……….The other two sisters were fair.

The mother
bathes her calf
mist rising
love, a pink tongue
in the morning
licks its forehead
dew blinks grass
fog lingers around their ankles
a vision
culled from the herd that crowds the hill.

Credits

“Space Time” was published first by Yellow Medicine Review and appears in the collection In Light, Always Light published by Finishing Line Press in 2019.

“Because” is from the collection In Light, Always Light published by Finishing Line Press in 2019.

About Angela Trudell Vasquez

Angela (Angie) Trudell Vasquez is a second- and third-generation Mexican-American writer, editor, small publisher, and the current poet laureate of Madison, Wisconsin (2020-2024). She holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Finishing Line Press published her collections, In Light, Always Light, in May 2019, and My People Redux, in January 2022. In 2021, she attended the Macondo Writers Workshop started by Sandra Cisneros, and became a fellow, also known as a Macondista. She is the current chair of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. Her work has appeared most recently in Yellow Medicine Review, Sheltering with Poems, In Other Words, Hope is the Thing, Poem-A-Day, and can be found on the Poetry Foundation’s website.

Find out more at www.angietrudellvasquez.com, www.artnightbooks.com, on Facebook and on Instagram.

Check out her new project, Poet in Residence with Madison Public Library, March to May 2022.

National Poetry Month

Photo by Nicole Taylor

National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

As the pandemic has continued into its second year, we at Brain Mill are thinking about spaces & places: how we exist in space, the importance of access, and the particulars of navigating places. We have gathered together in ways that may have been new to us over the last few years, greeting each other in small squares of connectivity, developing relationship and care with virtual check-ins, follows, and voices translated via technology. In our best moments we have learned to listen; in our worst, we have been caught up by all the ways we need to do better and think more deeply about community systems and for whom entry is barred.

Editors’ Picks Week 1: Poetry by Liz Ahl and Nora Kirkham

Editors' Picks, Week 1

Poetry by Liz Ahl and Nora Kirkham

Chairs

by Liz Ahl

 

My mother’s house has too many chairs.

I still take the pause of the initiate
when I say “my mother’s house.”

For how many more months or years
will I pause or stutter before saying,
“my mother’s house,” as if I am practicing
a new language, which of course I am?

Unlike her, I’m not immersed
in the country of that language

– the house – their house – her house –

though for her, even living there,
in the daily navigation of a geography of loss,
a steep learning curve, the receptors
for new language acquisition
burned out decades ago.

For both of us, then, still dreaming
in the mother-tongue—
the language where my father,
who designed this house, has not died.
We stumble back and forth long-distance
across translation’s porous membrane,
awkward, tender, misunderstanding, lonely.

At least I’ve got the certainty
the house was never mine—
designed by dad and built
long after I’d spun into my own life—
a welcome place to visit, but
I’d never claimed it, never had
my bedroom painted with my particular
childhood, though some furniture,
certain lamps and paintings, certain chairs,
kept through many homes, many moves,
still project a soft aura of kinship,
an enclosing our of memory.

His recliner is still angled towards hers,
hers towards his, casting blueprint lines
towards an invisible spot out there,
where they eventually intersect,
just on the other side of the picture window
which frames exquisitely the lacquered peaks
and the deep, flat fjord.

In the basement (his, always, still)
of that house (hers),
still perched atop a dusty rattan shelf,
is the perfect scale model of the house
he rendered precisely in white foam-core
complete with cut-out windows,
so he could hold it aloft to understand
how the light would fall into each room.

Jareen Imam author photo

Liz Ahl lives in New Hampshire. Her book of poems, Beating the Bounds, was published in 2017 by Hobblebush Books. Previous collections include the chapbooks Home Economics and Talking About the Weather, published in 2016 and 2012 by Seven Kitchens Press. Her second chapbook, Luck (Pecan Grove, 2010) received the New Hampshire Literary Awards “Reader’s Choice” in Poetry Award in 2011, and her first chapbook, A Thirst That’s Partly Mine, won the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook contest. Her poems have also appeared in Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, Prairie Schooner, Court Green, Crab Orchard Review, Measure, Cutthroat, and other journals. She has been awarded residencies at Jentel, Playa, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center.

From the Grass

by Nora Kirkham

 

We are on the train home from Aberdeen:
the hills are beginning to spring. You trail gorse
along a smudged window and spot deer,
a whole family of them, folded in a field.
Unfolding before your eyes, you thought
they were hares or birds. I wondered
how many creatures we had passed, how many
lived and died by us without ever knowing
they were seen, and if this matters, anyway.
In June I was in Salisbury, on a bus cresting
up a hill. Beyond the cathedral, a gold-leaf
glow spilled from glass windows and
I saw antlers flying, or maybe I dreamed.
From that bus window, I held on
to three light seconds of hooves lifting,
to the twisting of clover roots and soil
spreading only a millimeter further than
where it had been before.
Perhaps none of this mattered,
but I did not want to arrive at the next stop,
I wanted to turn back, I did not want to go
home. Some might call this haunting, how
these hidden lives breathe their way
up through new strands of grass—
they pass through us all the time. Sometimes,
from a window, we find them,
then forgetting is what makes them fly.

Jareen Imam author photo

Nora Kirkham is a poet from Maine currently based in Scotland. She was raised in Japan, Australia, and Eastern Europe. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from University College Cork, Ireland. Her writing has been featured in Rock & Sling, Ruminate Magazine, Tokyo Poetry Journal, and Topology Magazine.

National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

As the pandemic has continued into its second year, we at Brain Mill are thinking about spaces & places: how we exist in space, the importance of access, and the particulars of navigating places. We have gathered together in ways that may have been new to us over the last few years, greeting each other in small squares of connectivity, developing relationship and care with virtual check-ins, follows, and voices translated via technology. In our best moments we have learned to listen; in our worst, we have been caught up by all the ways we need to do better and think more deeply about community systems and for whom entry is barred.

Top photo by Daniel Watson on Pexels

BMP Voices Celebrates National Poetry Month 2022!

BMP Voices Celebrates National Poetry Month 2022

Poetry Contest: Poetry of Space/Place

Open All April – Fee Free

As the pandemic has continued into its second year, we at Brain Mill are thinking about spaces & places: how we exist in space, the importance of access, and the particulars of navigating places. We have gathered together in ways that may have been new to us over the last few years, greeting each other in small squares of connectivity, developing relationship and care with virtual check-ins, follows, and voices translated via technology. In our best moments we have learned to listen; in our worst, we have been caught up by all the ways we need to do better and think more deeply about community systems and for whom entry is barred.

In terms of poetry and creativity, we are interested in reading poems that speak to engagement with space/place, the architecture of the page, voices both on the page and off.

At Brain Mill Press’s pop-up magazine for National Poetry Month, we’ll be sharing posts from poets & creatives that speak to the above theme, as well as inviting entries for our fee-free contest organized around it.

Brain Mill seeks to highlight and platform the voices of underrepresented writers. We are inclusive and progressive, with a desire to read a variety of forms, aesthetics, and styles. Through curated featured poets posts, and our fee-free contest, we seek work that speaks to space/place.

Poems selected for the weekly Editor’s Choice selections, as well as for the Prizes will have the option to share their work as video/audio files, as well as text.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit 1-3 poems of any form or style that speak to space/place. Submissions will be reviewed for suitability by Brain Mill Press staff.

Those poets whose work is selected agree to grant Brain Mill Press the limited right to reproduce your piece on Voices. They retain all other rights to their work.

Poets’ submitted work and profile will be published on bmpvoices.com and promoted on our social media outlets. Your post will contain your headshot and bio, as well as information you may wish to include about recent work and your website and social media links.

Brain Mill Press strongly encourages submissions from people of color, women, LGBTQIA+ writers, First Nations writers, and disabled writers. Please direct inquiries not answered in this call to inquiries@brainmillpress.com.

Prizes

Four times in April, the Brain Mill Press editors will select one or more submitted poems as the editors’ choice pick(s) for the week. Editors’ choice selections may choose any poetry title from the Brain Mill Press catalog for their prize. In early May, the editors will select a winning poem, and the poet will receive the full collection of Brain Mill Press poetry titles for themselves, as well as a second collection to gift to an organization of their choice.

Top photo by Max Ostrozhinskiy on Unsplash