• The Ones Who Aren't Mentioned

    Michael Bazzett

    Summer 2020


    I like the stories best about the ones who aren’t 
    mentioned. 
            The offhand reference to the ears 
    of the serial killer’s dog, relaxing back 
         when her master enters the room, how
              her tail steadily thunks the carpet. 

          Or maybe the mouse watching the city burn, 
    flames twitching in the dark beads of her eyes.  

    Michael Bazzett’s fourth collection of poems, The Echo Chamber, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. His work has appeared in The Sun, the American Poetry Review, the Iowa Review, Threepenny Review, and Ploughshares, and his verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh (Milkweed 2018), was longlisted for the National Translation Award as well as named one of 2018’s ten best books of poetry by the New York Times.

    Read More

    Mind Fuck: Writing Better Sex

    Melissa Febos

    In order to write well about sex, we must write our whole selves into it; we must place our characters at the center of their own stories. This is an issue of craft, but it is also about joy—the joy of awakening to the full range of human experience, in all of its ecstatic, uncomfortable, freaky, transcendent, holy realness.

    Be Camera, Black-Eyed Aperture

    Ross Gay

    Let me start with devotion. Let me start with love. For instance: how I love this poem, and will be displaying a considerable, even admirable amount of restraint by not delving into every last aspect of it, every nugget of poetic glory: its range of dictions and registers, its broad scope of knowledge (mathematical, cultural, spiritual, ecological, vernacular); its ability or gall to signify, which just means talk shit (“look up the word southing before you use it in a sentence”; “One monkey don’t stop no show”) and a few breaths later say careful how you talk that shit (“Hey! Watch your language!”); its rhythms built out of short and long sentences, staccato and legato phrasings, the beautiful sensual mouthwork of “let your fat belly be quilts of quietus”; “Hogon. Dogon. Hubble. Stay hot”; those long sentences at the end (I have theories!); the poem’s palpable love for everything it lays its eyes and pencil on. (Excellent assignment, by the way: have students look up everything this poem carries in its sky-sized satchel, and then have them write something so full!) You are thinking my restraint flew out the window, but believe me, I’m not even started.

    jury duty

    Evie Shockley

    going through the oceans of files, talking
      of boys who were no angels? no. to serve is
    a right and our duty, each to each—but
      the potential juror peers into the courtroom
    as if it were quarantined for the plague.

    Merch

    Love The Sewanee Review? Shop our new merch!

    Contact

    The Sewanee Review
    735 University Avenue
    Sewanee, Tennessee 37383 USA
    931-598-1185
    sewaneereview@sewanee.edu

    Subscribe

    To enjoy The Sewanee Review in print and on your computer or mobile device, subscribe today.

    Already a member? Login

    © 2022 The University of the South

    Back to top
    Web Design and Development by Riverworks Marketing