Great Regulars: In her new poems, Tina Chang

steps from the terrain of history and loss navigated in her gorgeous first collection, Half-Lit Houses, toward the various places where one can sense the weight and the tug of public and private danger. Here, speakers move with quicksilver fluidity between the surreal or imagined and the grave realities of the worlds that contain them. --Tracy K. Smith

Strange Theater

from Guernica: Poetry: Three Poems [by Tina Chang]

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Terrance Hayes is constantly pushing toward new possibilities for private inquiry and new structures against which to ballast his buoyant and boundless sense of language. These poems marry swank and swagger to what I like to think of as a 21st Century gravitas. --Tracy K. Smith

God is an American

from Guernica: Poetry: Three Poems [by Terrance Hayes]

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Aaron Smith is an expert at locating the spaces within spaces. In these three poems, he zeroes in on the places where doubt and possibility collide and unsettle our beliefs. They are graceful, full of humility and hard fact, and they aren't afraid of making you laugh to yourself, or better--at yourself. --Tracy K. Smith

Mailbox Blue (Ars Poetica)

from Guernica: Poetry: Three Poems [by Aaron Smith]

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Kyle Booten, the youngest writer in the group, is an undergraduate student of creative writing whose poems dwell in imaginative spaces on the far side of history. I'm dazzled by his ability to balance arresting beauty and lyrical grace with a mischievous wit that moves quietly and steadily throughout his poems. --Tracy K. Smith

Country Parson's Epitaph

from Guernica: Poetry: Two Poems [by Kyle Booten]

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David Semanki's terse and elegant poems study the weight of gestures, silence, hope and misgiving as they exist within his human subjects. His gaze is cinematic in its precision, spotlighting the emotional and narrative significance of small yet key details within the everyday world: street lamps, roadside weeds, chimes in a courtyard, the frost on a window. --Tracy K. Smith

Film Study: Transcendence

from Guernica: Poetry: Two Poems [by David Semanski]

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Sean Singer's obsession with jazz has not subsided. On the contrary, his new poems continue to push and bend the jazz lexicon, racing toward the lives and voices that sit at its center. With sonic agility, these poems stride and comp and croon and whimper in service, not just of music, but of the aches and the dilemmas that make music necessary. In the two poems included here, he channels legendary musicians Charlie Parker and Hank Mobley. --Tracy K. Smith

"This one's my Cadillac. This one's my house."

from Guernica: Poetry: Two Poems [by Sean Singer]

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