June 28

Later, People Took On Qualities That Planets Usually Have by Rebecca Wadlinger

Julie: The other day, I kinda dismissed a poem because of its title. But I confessed to it! This time, I was inclined to like a poem for its title, and that inclination has held up. I like essentially everything about this poem, with two tiny question marks. Why ampersands? Why those short little lines at the ends of strophes? I'm not criticizing, mind you, they were just choices that I didn't understand in the context of this poem.

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They are taking their celebrity into their own hands by Deborah Wardlaw Pattillo

Julie: I like this though I would be hard-pressed to explain why. And when I read it over, I think that I like only the last sentence, that I'm treading water until then, waiting for something special to happen. The last sentence is the poem. It could be clipped that far.

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Olives by AE Stallings

Julie: Nice. Everything about this shows control, and a sense of how rhyme can support a poem rather than hiding it (or even worse, creating it). The tendency amongst so many bad formalists to build nothing into a poem and defend it with its own rhymes is ghastly. Stallings doesn't fall prey.