When the poet Frank Bidart came to speak at my father’s memorial service in New Brunswick, New Jersey, I was touched. Bidart had been my father’s favorite student at The University of Riverside in California and was often the subject of dinner-table conversation. After moving to New Jersey, where my Mayflower father taught at Rutgers, [...]
Category Archives: Poetry
Just Down City
February 22, 2012 – 3:59 pm
Text by Annie DeWitt, images by Jerome Jakubiec My mother never said, Don’t Usher The Good Times In. She never took the pot from my hand and said, Don’t Beat On It With A Stick. Don’t Make Noise. She never threw up the window shade and said, Don’t Look Out. Or, I Remember Chilly [...]
Benjamin Gantcher
February 15, 2012 – 4:16 am
On the Trail of the Book At dawn stanchions stand at attention when the pearl sky with smudges stretches The bridge is the zone of dull shadows nosing around the washed out snapshot where the word oblivion affixes wings to the paperboy and the road is a partisan smuggling colored thread inside the cinder garden [...]
A Valentine’s Day Soundtrack From ESP
February 14, 2012 – 12:05 pm
Love is War for Miles Aquarius Heaven… Blu and Exile (letter) (Quit it) Nat Adderley (Give me my month) Blake (Mike and the Sensations) Nico Jaar (Anything Goes/You used to think) Erica Pomerance (The Idea of Ancestry) Etheridge Knight Blue and Exile (Don’t be…) (Tia) Arthur Nunes Gonjasufi (Love of Reign) (Black Christ [...]
Sophie Rosenblum
January 18, 2012 – 6:24 am
Awful Math The commotion surrounding the awful math grew to a hollering, and soon Jenny pitched in an extra twenty dollars saying, “I’ll just give more, that’s all.” But that wasn’t all, and once we were in the car, she was off on a steady pace about which one of my moron friends was going [...]
Bruce Smith
October 12, 2011 – 2:23 pm
Congratulations to Bruce Smith and his incredible new collection of poetry, Devotions, which has just been named a finalist for the 2011 National Book Awards. What better a time than now to give our online readers a sampling of his work. This fabulous poem, Devotion: Midrash, originally appeared in Issue 6 of Dossier. ————————— DEVOTION: [...]
Philip Levine, Poet Laureate
August 10, 2011 – 8:12 am
THE WANDERING POETS (by Philip Levine, from Dossier Issue #5) As they return from their pilgrimage, footsore and disgusted, only a few wear jackets and ties. As usual Gerald is the most emphatic: he stands at the corner of Broadway and Spring and demands that an angel descend carrying a glass of tea sugared with [...]
