Cathexis
Northwest
Press
Featured Poets
New Poetry Issues on the 1st of each Month
Books and Merchandise Available Now!
Check out our nominations for
Best Of The Net and Pushcart
under Awards!
December 2019
Father’s Day, 2018
Say I am pre-corpse, a first draft at fertilizer,
say that all attempts to capture my presence alive
are in root. Speak and do me the honor of mis-
remembering. You are in the garden working,
the bittersweet vines have overtaken the yard again.
I do not laugh at these improbables. I cannot
make a sound true enough. Here, you are a gentle man,
a caretaker with no fuses. Here, when the earth
....
Parting
Give me the wood with the bark on it.
Some of that real, raw Truth-Speak.
I won’t be trapped in amber,
suspended in fossils of what we mean
to one another.
I won’t wear our memories
like costumes for dress-up forever,
happy to reimagine I am the woman
you or all men want—Helen of Troy, or
Miss Baker, our high school History teacher.
....
Beta
My mind swirls with the force of self, worries
whirlpooling inward until he collides with me
the small blond boy running down/ Cambridge street,
his tiny cold fingers clutch a clear plastic bag/ pregnant with water,
a blur of deep blue suspended
in a translucent womb.
His bundled body vibrates with care to give.
He imagines flakes to feed, an empty bowl
to appoint with pebbles and plastic grass, does/ not sense
the man chasing after as though the child/ might outrun his father’s love—
....
that one time we were almost people
By
Christian Czaniecki
Coming January 2020
Debut poetry collection by Christian Czaniecki
"The poems in this collection are sharp, fiercely intelligent, multi-faceted, and, best of all, deeply-considered. Quick moving and thinking, these are truly poems that belong to our current world, which demands critical thought and nuanced artistry. While the collection meditates on the homogeneity of a suburban world, the voice of this emerging poet is anything but ordinary."
--July Westhale, author of Via Negativa & Trailer Trash
"There is such eternal longing in these poems of Robert Krantz. A series of gorgeously rendered, honest laments about the world and our place in it. Pleas for acceptance, for forgiveness, for just one moment of seeing without the blinders on, with a clearer vision. The world is composed of both darkness and light, and we are no different. Bloodied knuckles and skinless mice balanced against luminous wheat fields and a night sky that’s almost worth praying to. Almost. This is Krantz’ gift. His revelation. He challenges us to see, perhaps even celebrate, the almostness of our nature. He wounds us; he shows us ways to heal from those wounds."
-
John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes Another
"Seung reintroduces us to ourselves through his richly particular yet powerfully identifiable and broad and human portraiture. Again and again we are invited into complex and divergent expressions of human experience, resulting in a heterogeneous testimony of meaningful life."
