LESLEY WHEELER

Category: Poetry at the Border

  • A slightly terrifying amount of reading

    “Admit that Mexico is your double, that she exists in the shadow of this country, that we are irrevocably tied to her. Gringo, accept the doppelganger in your psyche. By taking back your collective shadow the intracultural split will heal.” (page 108) “This land was Mexican once/ was Indian always/ and is./ And will be…

  • Poetry at the Border: Ann Fisher-Wirth

    This blog’s intermittent “Poetry at the Border” feature returns with two excerpts from the powerful new collection Mississippi, a striking large-format collaboration between poet Ann Fisher-Wirth and photographer Maude Schuyler Clay. While focused on a specific state, this book is full of borderlands and hinges: between poetry and photographs, between history and the present, and among races…

  • Poetry at the Border: Leona Sevick

    My British immigrant mother didn’t oversee our swimming lessons. Having grown up poor, visiting the kind of beaches where you’d make a fire and boil tea to warm up, she was scared of the water. Instead, it’s one of the very few things I remember doing with my father, who swam daily at the Y.…

  • Poetry at the Border 2: Cynthia Hogue

    Poet and translator Cynthia Hogue on how borders work: Events today around border issues have brought back personal experience so eerily and uncannily as to seem to me the return of the repressed. The events recounted and per/formed in the excerpted poem that follows, “The Green Card Is Not Green,” happened twelve years ago to my…

  • Poetry at the Border: Jane Satterfield

    I hereby launch an intermittent feature of this blog–“Poetry at the Border.” Each post in this series will focus on a poet who worries some kind of threshold. Borders of various kinds are always relevant to poetry–crossings in genre, sound, language, and psychological states as well as of national/ cultural identities and traditions–but this topic…