An Interview with Margaret Vandenburg

[T]his novel is more about the pace of house-to-house combat. The intimacy of it. Storming into people’s bedrooms and bathrooms.

Post Mortem

is there a torment like the self
is there a secret like anger,

from Language’s Body

A typewriter is fine, another says, it is nothing like a constellation. No, but it is like the lines we’ve drawn between the stars to easier map the sky.

Out of Nowhere Into Nothing

I could never forget the CGI graphic of a slim slow-motion stick—a poky cocktail prop—sailing through the poorly drawn canals of what was supposed to represent the inside of—everyone’s? anyone’s?—intestines as it slid awkwardly around the body’s bends like a panicked child down a waterslide.

from Paraguayan Sea, by Wilson Bueno

And now I’d like to tell you just one hairy secret:

Two Poems

Am I going to die and all I will have are these fucking poems
It doesn’t get more real than this
Said the poet

Three Poems

a sleep as liquid as bees striking, straining against the sun
all along planning to eat them animals as I do