Philip Metres

Aug 9, 2024 | vqronline.org | Philip Metres

this heart, its caverns of somewhere laughter, its waking craters, its forest of knives. Dilate its thin pulsing complicities& cigar-fat arteries, cradle its crack-addict angels camping beneath its highway insomniac drivers carvingout the night with fog-boggled high beams. Exalt its inclement weather & its untethered animal wagging at strangersin hospital ruins & boomtown cranes. Baptize its blind need.

Aug 9, 2024 | vqronline.org | Philip Metres

Who knows how many of us                                                      you’ve killed, dead set on what flows beneath, your mouth                                                               a thin arrow drilling our fevered interior. Delicatedagger, imperial                                 fly, you trail like halos clouding martyrs’ heads, your wings a music planes mimic. Older                                than war, you vanquisharrogance.

May 14, 2024 | publishersweekly.com | Philip Metres |Bei Dao |Richard Blanco

Susan L. Leary. Trio House, $18 trade paper (94p) ISBN 978-1-949487-23-7In this moving debut, Leary meditates on the spaces the dead leave behind, offering an elegiac exploration of sibling bonds through the story of a brother lost too young to an overdose in jail.

Apr 24, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Philip Metres |Thomas Geoghegan |Beverly Willett |Sharon Mesmer

Fed by the brazen gift of drought’s famine,Her tongue tasting language after languageHere at our search-burned landfill of garbage,A migrant woman scrounges for samplingsThat might fill her children’s insides. Scavenge,Mother of Exiles, on your paltry stage. You play the part of a human bandageOn a body that will not stop bleeding. She says: “Storied landlords, open your doorsTo us, the roofless.

Apr 10, 2024 | pw.org | Philip Metres

Having worked on peace and justice initiatives for Palestine and Israel for twenty-five years, and published poetry on the subject, I’ve been devastated in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s assault on Gaza. The former killed about twelve hundred people and took more than two hundred fifty hostages, and the latter, as of this writing, has killed more than thirty thousand people and injured at least seventy thousand.