• In Thermopylae

    Ishion Hutchinson

    Winter 2019

    i.m. Seamus Heaney 

     

    Your

    longed-for music, through cement, through wood,
    through the guttural autumn taxis,

    unclouding

    swift and pale down avenues, with the stark
    outbreak of troops in the epic muslin, black

    as dawn’s cinders, towards the true north
    of your irises’ extinction, afire, to-torn flashes

    of dark at wakes, where crude bounces
    beyond any proof

    God outpaces

    the supposition of your death. All remains like
    an erring spring, in another place,

    Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.

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    Late Migrations

    Margaret Renkl

    This life thrives on death. But hold very, very still in the springtime sun, and a tufted titmouse will come to harvest your hair and spin it into a soft, warm place for her young. Keep an eye on the ivy climbing the side of the house, and one day you will see a pair of finches coaxing their babies from a tiny nest balanced among the leaves. Hear the bluebirds calling from the trees, and you might turn in time to see a fledgling peer from the hole in the dark nest box, gape at the bright wide world for the very first time, and then trust itself to the sky. Wait at the window on the proper day, and the cottontail nest hidden under the rosemary bush will open before you, spilling forth little rabbits who lift the leaves from last fall and push aside their mother’s fur and raise their ears and wrinkle their noses and bend for their first taste of the bitter dandelion. And it will be exactly what they wanted. 

    3Q4: Ben Austen

    The Sewanee Review

    If Bellow can’t really see the black neighborhoods that surround Hyde Park, if he depicts black men in his fiction only as sexual signifiers there to play upon the psyche of white characters, then Staples will write those omitted scenes. He’ll render the people and spaces in their complicated glory and failure. He essentially out-writes Bellow. It’s brilliant. Along with, say, the work of Eula Biss, it’s as good a Chicago personal essay as there is, and I aspire to that.

    Graham Barnhart

     

    In which Graham Barnhart, poet and US Army veteran, discusses the paradox of being an army medic—“You carry a rifle and an aid bag full of medical supplies to treat the people you’re potentially expected to shoot”; and the capacity of poetry to contain that paradox without limiting it: “How do I communicate what feels like a personal experience without ignoring the violence and oppression of the machine I’m a part of that allowed me to receive that experience, even providing medical care as a way of pursuing the war?”

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    sewaneereview@sewanee.edu

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