Welcome to National Poetry Month, 2015! We’re celebrating all month long. Each day we will bring you a poem we love–a selection from one of our published or forthcoming collections. In turn, the featured poets will introduce poems they love. Happy April!
Today’s featured poet is Caleb Curtiss, author of A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us.
Self-Portrait Without My Dead Sister
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Upon serious reflection
I’ve concluded that the day my sister died, all in all,
really wasn’t such a bad day, per se: the weather
& the allergy index & at least she was around
for part of it, & so on. But even beyond that,
it was a moment of great hope & excitement for all,
& also, who was I to mourn amid the hustle
& the bustle & the various smeared beauty products
& all those no really’s hanging on my mouth
like likes and ums, & etcetera. And also,
who was I to question the order of this new universe,
which, despite my suspicion that it might just do so,
has kept on expanding in all of its bovine splendor,
leaving behind its quivers of matter, its great clumps
of long time?
Originally published in Gigantic Sequins
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Caleb has chosen to introduce three poems by Tarfia Faizullah.
He says: Tarfia Faizullah’s poems in Hobart have probably stuck with me more than anything I’ve read online in the past year. In these poems, Faizullah shows how the self can experience emotional and intellectual depth as being one in the same, how the mind and the body are products of one another when rendered in high relief.
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Caleb Curtiss is the author of A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us. His writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from such journals as Green Mountains Review, Passages North, International Poetry Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Quiddity, & TriQuarterly. He lives in Champaign, Illinois.