Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Red Ocher
    Red Ocher
    Red Ocher
    Ebook69 pages39 minutes

    Red Ocher

    By Jessica Poli

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Finalist, 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

    In Jessica Poli’s Red Ocher, the wild mortality of the natural world merges with melancholic expressions of romantic loss: a lamb runt dies in the night, a first-time lover inflicts casual cruelties, brussels sprouts rot in a field, love goes quietly and unbearably unrequited. This is an ecopoetics that explores the cyclical natures of love and grief, mindful that “there will be room for desire / again, even after it leaves / like a flood receding, / the damaged farmhouses / and washed-away bridges / lying scattered the next day / amid silt and debris.” Throughout, Poli’s poems hold space for the sacred—finding it in woods overgrown with thorny weeds, in drunken joy rides down rural roads, and in the red ocher barns that haunt the author’s physical and emotional landscapes.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Arkansas Press
    Release dateMar 1, 2023
    ISBN9781610757942
    Red Ocher

    Related to Red Ocher

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: November 2020

      Nov 5, 2020

      Stop obsessively refreshing the New York Times's elections page, and check out these new books of poetry by Alice Quinn, Margaret Atwood, Yi Lei, Karina Borowicz, Valzhyna Mort, and Paul Celan. The post Must-Read Poetry: November 2020 appeared first

      6 min read

    • Article

      Rot

      Sep 2, 2022

      Rot
      1 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      Two Poems
      2 min read

    • Article

      Younger Than War

      Nov 9, 2023

      Younger Than War
      1 min read

    • Article

      A River Runs Through It

      Apr 14, 2020

      A River Runs Through It
      1 min read

    • Article

      Diaspora Sonnets

      Sep 1, 2022

      The old men drink their spritzers and gossipunder awnings. Red hued and blustery, like two roosters on the side of a road.Skyward they crane their necks and laugh, sometimes they wonder about kings and future kingsand how the muscles peer from their

      2 min read

    • Article

      On A Better Life By Randall Mann

      Mar 1, 2022

      In the first and title poem of A Better Life (Persea Books, 2021), Randall Mann looks back incredulous at having ever arrived at the age of thirty, a milestone now “fourteen years” in his past. Having survived longer than he might have imagined, Mann

      5 min read

    • Article

      Follow Them

      Nov 1, 2021

      Heartbroken over a football game, Autumnevening, of this kind of thing I’m not ashamednor of the twistiness of that diction,or wanting America to burnthough only certain parts deserve it,its forests are beautiful and have donenothing wrong, even the

      1 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Early such darkness, these oncoming nights& sure, I’m dull & even slow to concedehow mornings make equal, swerving measuresthere between those foremost shadowsalong the fence, amid the chickens & nerve,sheep & their indifference to any pair of foolsh

      3 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      Maybe every choice is in some way false,like whether to wonder or worry,or feel alive or alone in Clevelandor Memphis or any standard double queentrying to unwrap a tiny hotel soap.There’s always another one waitingin the dish like a stale communion

      2 min read

    • Article

      Read This Now

      Jul 25, 2023

      From an ugly chapter of our city's history, award-winning poet Nicole Sealey has distilled beauty. Her new collection of poems, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, out August 15 from Knopf, takes the Department of Justice report detailing the killing of

      1 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      like a ghost ship in spacesomething see-through how the moon used to besomething impalpable untouchableor when you go to touch it your hand goes through itsomething haunted it takes something hauntedto haunt you like a lakelike a half a head of hair

      4 min read

    • Article

      Devil Asks Why You Would Mouth The Word Pity

      Jul 1, 2022

      even in this abundance of dark? Even in this abundance of dark you have totake the stars on faith. Look: Under today’s dim sky there is a basket.In that basket there is a fish. Come night, you are the animal that will eat the best parts of it. And ye

      1 min read

    • Article

      An Appreciation Of Julia De Burgos, “Farewell In Welfare Island”

      Jan 1, 2022

      It has to be from here,right this instance,my cry into the world. Life was somewhere forgottenand sought refuge in depths of tearsand sorrowsover this vast empire of solitudeand darkness. Where is the voice of freedom,freedom to laugh,to movewithout

      11 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      i look like someonehealing from an accidentbecause i am someonehealing from an accidentthe book of actsscales falling from saul’s eyesremembering my capacityfor stillnesshow long can i sitwithout looking awaythe fear of god escapingi desperately need

      3 min read

    • Article

      Decision [de-, Caedere-, Latin]

      Mar 1, 2024

      Life is a series of decisions to move this poster to another room; that ass to some other chair.There isn’t really much to it, and then we’re done for. There was a time I wrote, seriously, about grief. I wonder whyI can’t do that anymore. Maybe it’s

      2 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2021

      All I wantis a good night and coffee in the morningwithout conversation so I can considerhow my life— which made a new life—is still so incomplete. How can something smallmultiply to something large? Mathematics is a strange science.Prayer is an impo

      1 min read

    • Article

      Imagination Is a Muscle

      May 30, 2023

      Imagination Is a Muscle
      8 min read

    • Article

      Resistance and Reclamation

      Oct 13, 2021

      IN LATE 2016, adoptee poet and Kundiman fellow Leah Silvieus initiated a research project about the ways in which emerging adoptee poets contend with identity, loss, culture, and family in their work. She sent a query through the Kundiman network, lo

      17 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2020

      She was a security guard and even though her uniform was black I could seeIt was covered in blood, the marble floor was covered in blood, it wasSlowly pooling out from the space where HER HAND used to beOh my god, I said, then I started to say, YOUR

      3 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      May 1, 2022

      Proof your dream is true: seeingthe Prophet’s face. As a child in Mecca,I once imagined I saw him. We prayed for whole dayson rugs behind the concentric circles of people doing tawaf.White marble everywhere! Soon even the air looked hazywith light, s

      1 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Jesse Nathan

      Jun 8, 2021

      Young gray cat puddled under the boxwood,Only the eyes alert. Appressed to dirt. That hissThe hiss of the grasses hissing What shouldWhat should. Blank road shimmers. On days like this,My mind, you hardlySeem to be.On days like these. No, no. See tha

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Element of Silence: The Millions Interviews N. Scott Momaday

      Jul 20, 2022

      "Too many people just write down things in haste that look like poetry, but they’re not." The post The Element of Silence: The Millions Interviews N. Scott Momaday appeared first on The Millions.

      9 min read

    • Article

      You Are A Guest Of Nature: Behave

      May 1, 2022

      (after Friedensreich Hundertwasser) From where I standthe river is a symbol and the landscape less itselfthan our idea of itself. We walk through unawareof the compromise. We don’t speak the river’s tongue.Mythic bottled panorama. It was built for mo

      1 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Red Ocher

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Red Ocher - Jessica Poli

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1