The Life Fact Shines

Eleni, don’t drive so fast

˜˜˜˜˜˜ Read More >

When Word Came of My Mother’s Death Read More >

How many ways of knowing can you think of? Sure, there’s the kind of knowing physically, emotionally, or psychologically, and then there’s a bird’s kind of knowing, or a turtle’s, or a girl’s. Here Joanna Penn Cooper invites you to explore a kind of knowing shared with scrawny trees as witness. And everyone knows what Shakespeare says about trees, they give many their ear, but to no one their voice. Read More >

Brynne Rebele-Henry is a poet who maps the body’s horizon with a surveyor’s prism stick, and plums the emotional lanternfish of the deep like Jacques Cousteau. Who is the mighty Read More >

Have you ever been at war with yourself? Have you ever not been? “Devotional poem” by Kate Lutzner, explores this particular human predicament with the precision of an astro-physicist studying the star that may one day annihilate the earth. We here in the Poet Republik love all of Kate’s poetry, and this is just a sample of her forthcoming collection, Invitation to a Rescue which will be out by Poet Republik Ltd. later this month.

Devotional poem

I am at war with myself, all the cells
in my body gathering their weapons,
their fists. The doctor says there will
be a decline, to look for it, to give
myself over to it when the time comes.
I was used to suffering before words
formed on my tongue, my mouth
filled with a concern, the opposite
of empathy. Bits of grief build
like nodules in my throat, all
the devotion that will someday
form there threatening to dissolve
into need. Help me to express
all the uses of my being, to learn
what it means to live with this
urge, this right to nothing
but lending myself to others,
this right to be healed.

Kate Lutzner‘s poetry and stories have appeared in such journals as Antioch Review, Mississippi Review, The Brooklyn Rail, BlazeVOX, Rattle and Barrow Street. She was awarded the Robert Frost Poetry Prize by Kenyon College and is recipient of the Jerome Lowell Dejur Award and the Stark Short Fiction Prize. Kate holds a J.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from City College. She has been featured in Verse Daily. Kate has a novel, The Only One Who Loves You, on Amazon Kindle.

We are happy to announce Jameson O’Hara Laurens as the winner of the Ping-Pong Free Press Poetry Prize 2016: Judge, Melissa Broder. Her collection MEDÆUM was published Fall of 2016, here is a poem from this outstanding collection. Congratulations Jameson! Read More >

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of five books poetry, most recently The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press 2015) and Pageant (Alice James Books 2009). She served as poetry editor for Ping-Pong Journal of Art and Literature.

I Have a Secret Crush on Everyone in the World

When I say I have a secret crush on everyone
in the world, I mean the earth is a fur-covered
fireball, speeding into the expanding spaces
between paragliding atoms. It means I have
a crush on the way your dangling earlobes
say one thing and your elephant, anxious
hips say another– the way you dial the same
number six times before you build up the nerve
to finish. And yes, it means I am seriously
crushing on your chipped gold nail polish,
the way it signifies a desire to make the world
more beautiful, but also the way it displays
a fuck-you approach to beauty. I was going
to email to say I have a crush on your pre-
apocalyptic recipe poems, but it’s 2016
and according to twitter only old folks
use email. Is there anything more crush-
worthy than a manifesto spelled out in
lightly frosted snickerdoodles, or an essay
floating in a lagoon-shaped swimming pool?
I have a public crush on the number 8 bus,
alfresco Thai brunches and dirty Brooklyn
swans. I love all errors and eras equally.
I have a repressed crush on New Jersey
pollution, the way its oil refineries remind
me I have a nose. To have a crush is to crush
out doubt so thoroughly its green, leathery
skin becomes your own, to taste another’s
DNA so purely Januaries dissolve into vats
of frothy vanilla egg creams, spilling into
the cracks of your spine and your loose brain
jelly, into old feet and the cold twitch of your
jaw. To crush is to slide into the neural network
where our wires are made of bird songs
and magenta-colored loss, is to feel the floor
open and the reverberating metallic shivers after.

This poem first appeared in Apogee Magazine

For this month’s edition of Poet Republik we welcome Krystal Simpson. She works in the world of fashion and celebrity with 89K instagram followers. When she posted her response to the horror of Orlando last weekend, I noticed she received almost no responses. Read More >

I am apoplectic with joy to be reading with Lisa Samuels on April 17th for the folks at Torn Page Poetry Parlor

from Wild Dialectics (Shearsman Books 2012)

Peephole metaphysics

Listening for you listening notes for right to seek up

futures as a buffer against permanence can you make

actuality not a matter of argument I’m sirry I’m political

ready to drag down changeable as the crew people

jumping in to small boats showing their interest

without necessary attributes to be hot, so hot

sirrah listening to the heart boats bombing are you

new to the names amidst your hectares get along

new to your improves on several hats beside the year’s

tasted aperture months ready to open pour in

astonished to discover mouths underneath the boats

craggy as fashionable creamy broody belts in range

out of range the edges of the heart mouths totally

unsteady drama groovy coming along worth trying

to sell our inherited personalities for settlement when

people came here they planted themselves in utterly familiar

and hills coming along at the edges of the heart

mouths planting the recognizable in water at the moment

falling through the atlas trope sway comprehensive

for another album of highlights everybody getting a little

somefin a tiny mouthful louche over the skin of the teeth

a point especially clear when terms of value broken

across the example becomes clear a like simple

economy of scale transient as the top blend came on

a simple feat hot off the head as hundreds rippled

like scales real as existence marbles tottling on

the edges of the site kept at it fully every rim

consistent turning square to diamante pusher

folly coming along saying flask as catskin blueberry

rich or cast is it what you expectation frag there

slightly animistic with an absolute forearm

or what it means to compromise with cultural life

as you make room make room stead skulldigger

in a roaring mind the trophy on your head your own

juggy code out at the stuck late skin in show

I often kilter or a separately repeated to see how

it changes a man with a fixed expression in plastics

a cast as what you expectation frag there yes

Lisa Samuels is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, with recent experiments in memoir (Anti M, Chax 2013) and the novel (Tender Girl, Dusie 2015). Her poetry is in anthologies such as Out of Everywhere 2 (Reality Street 2015) and has inspired scholarly work and musical scores internationally. Her literary essays include Over Hear: six types of poetry experiment in Aotearoa/New Zealand (TinFish 2015), and in 2016 she is a visiting scholar at the University of Washington Simpson Humanities Center, writing The Civic Unconscious (poetry) and The Long White Cloud of Unknowing (prose) and continuing experiments in soundwork. Some of her writing and recordings can be found via the Electronic Poetry Center, academia.edu, and pennsound.

Orange-crowned Fairywrens

The men bring petals to their lovers while staying loyal to their wives; here come
our flames, they’ll teach us latticework,
uneven brokenness. Read More >