“Human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast, and are up against a force majeure. Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one mood, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting.” —Isak Dinesen, “The Monkey” Poet-priest Spencer Reece’s long-awaited second collection, The Road to Emmaus, fittingly opens with this epigraph from Isak Dinesen. Reece’s disarmingly straightforward, vulnerable narrative poems are haunted by loss and charged with the effort to preserve the ephemeral, the fleeting. But, still, he acknowledges, “The Gospel of John was right:/ the world holds so much life./ There are not enough books to record it all.”

For two weeks he’s been watching the same girl, someone he sees in the plaza. In her twenties maybe, drinking coffee in the afternoon, the little dark head bent over a magazine. He watches from across the square, pretending to be buying something, cigarettes, maybe a bouquet of flowers. Because she doesn’t know it exists, her power is very great now, fused to the needs of his imagination. He is her prisoner. She says the words he gives her in a voice he imagines, low-pitched and soft, a voice from the south as the dark hair must be from the south. Soon she will recognize him, then begin to expect him. And perhaps then every day her hair will be freshly washed, she will gaze outward across the plaza before looking down. And after that they will become lovers. But he hopes this will not happen immediately since whatever power she exerts now over his body, over his emotions, she will have no power once she commits herself— she will withdraw into that private world of feeling women enter when they love. And living there, she will become like a person who casts no shadow, who is not present in the world; in that sense, so little use to him it hardly matters whether she lives or dies.

It’s always thrilling when National Poetry Month rolls around, and especially so this year, because we need every single sign of spring we can get! We’re proud to remember that this annual ritual, which is now in its 19th year, began as an idea in the FSG marketing meeting that the Academy of American Poets has transformed into a vivid and enduring reality. Now it’s a deeply ingrained part of the publishing year and a welcome way of focusing on the richness and variety of poetic culture in America.

“When the Pulitzers showered on some dope or screw who flushed our dry mouths out with soap, few people would consider why I took to stalking sailors, and scattered Uncle Sam’s phoney gold-plated laurels to the birds. Because I knew my Whitman like a book, stranger in America, tell my country: I, Catullus redivivus, once the rage of the Village and Paris, used to play my role of homosexual, wolfing the stray lambs who hungered by the Place de la Concorde. My profit was a pocket with a hole. Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age, must lay his heart out for my bed and board.”

Dogwood blossoms drift down at evening as semis pound past Phoenix Seafood and the Savarin plant, west to the Turnpike, Paterson or hills beyond. The adulterated, pearly light and bleak perfume of benzene and exhaust make this solitary tree and the last of its bloom as stirring just now after another...

July 4th fireworks exhale over the Hudson sadly. It is beautiful that they have to disappear. It’s like the time you said I love you madly. That was an hour ago. It’s been a fervent year. I don’t really love fireworks, not really, the flavorful floating shroud In the nighttime sky above the river and the crowd. This time, because of the distance upriver perhaps, they’re not loud, Even the colors aren’t, the patterns getting pregnant and popping. They get bigger and louder when they start stopping. They try to rally At the finale. It’s the four-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery— Which is why the fireworks happen on this side of the island this year. Shad are back, and we celebrate the Hudson’s Clean Water Act recovery. What a joy to eat the unborn. We’re monsters, I fear. What monsters we’re. We’ll binge on shad roe next spring in the delicious few minutes it’s here.

I was going to write a poem I made a pie instead     it took about the same amount of time of course the pie was a final draft     a poem would have had some distance to go     days and weeks and much crumpled paper the pie already had a talking tumbling audience among small trucks and a fire engine on the kitchen floor

For most of his contemporaries, France was the place to go for culture, food, and education; for John Ashbery, the place, but especially its language, provided—from his very first encounter with it—something even more personal. As a fourteen-year-old sophomore at the Sodus High School in rural upstate New York, the French language gave Ashbery the ability to explore private thoughts in a form that only he could read and understand. He had roiling ideas and feelings—irritations at school and home, crushes on both girls and boys, uncertainties about love and sex—and curious, anxious parents. To whom could he express himself? That year his mother bought him his first diary; he purchased the next three. These books contained his first raw translations.

Love’s time’s beggar, but even a single hour, bright as a dropped coin, makes love rich. We find an hour together, spend it not on flowers or wine, but the whole of the summer sky and a grass ditch. For thousands of seconds we kiss; your hair like treasure...

How brightly you whistle, pushing the long soft feathers on your rump down across the branch, like the apron of a butcher, as you impale a cricket on a meat hook deep inside my rhododendron. Poor cricket can hardly stand the whistling, not to speak of the brownish-red pecking (couldn’t...

Inspired by the sketches of Guillermo Riveros and FSG's Gregory Wazowicz, the Work in Progress team put together this Highly Scientific quiz to help you determine which FSG poet you are (or, really, which poets you might want to check out this Poetry Month). For more #FSGPoetry recommendations, click here...

The cold remote islands And the blue estuaries Where what breathes, breathes The restless wind of the inlets, And what drinks, drinks The incoming tide; Where shell and weed Wait upon the salt wash of the sea, And the clear nights of stars Swing their lights westward To set behind the land; Where the pulse...

She crossed a bridge, and looking down she saw The little Georgian boiling in a trench of blood. He hailed her, and holding up his one good arm He opened his palm to show her two pulpy seeds Like droplets—one for each time she lost her life. Then in a taunting voice he chanted some verses.

The kitchen's old-fashioned planter's clock portrays A smiling moon as it dips down below Two hemispheres, stars numberless as days, And peas, tomatoes, onions, as they grow Under that happy sky; but though the sands Of time put on this vegetable disguise, The clock covers its face with long, thin hands. Another smiling moon begins to rise.

Thank you!   Any observer of my life would say that I've never been wise in my erotic choices, but have been extraordinarily lucky in friendships.

I loved his ten demented chickens and the hell-eyed dog, the mailbox shaped like a huge green gun. I loved the eyesore opulence of his five partial cars, the wonder-cluttered porch

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984 She taught me what her uncle once taught her: How easily the biggest coal block split If you got the grain and the hammer angled right.

I. Is it winter again, is it cold again, didn’t Frank just slip on the ice, didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted didn’t the night end, didn’t the melting ice flood the narrow gutters wasn’t my body rescued, wasn’t it safe didn’t the scar form, invisible above the injury terror and cold, didn’t they just end, wasn’t the back garden harrowed and planted— I remember how the earth felt, red and dense, in stiff rows, weren’t the seeds planted, didn’t vines climb the south wall I can’t hear your voice for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground I no longer care what sound it makes when I was silenced, when did it first seem pointless to describe that sound what it sounds like can’t change what it is— didn’t the night end, wasn’t the earth safe when it was planted didn’t we plant the seeds, weren’t we necessary to the earth, the vines, were they harvested?

Half my friends are dead. I will make you new ones, said earth. No, give me them back, as they were, instead, with faults and all, I cried. Tonight I can snatch their talk from the faint surf's drone through the canes, but I cannot walk on the moonlit leaves of...

It’s his vision of this piss-colored parchment. With griffins cinched near the edges of the frame. As Africa, newly rivered, sits mysterious as the brain Of his New World, its synopsis as curt as Enjambment. Its proposed longitudes and latitudes Meeting mid-ocean and forming warped crosses Wrapping around the water...