the reviews are in... glad everyone's enjoying song of the worm

– Anne Sexton, from a letter to Anne Clarke dated March 23, 1964. Via "violentwavesofemotion"

I remember being younger and sometimes wishing to be a single child, to have all the attention and gifts and time but when he was away from home for the first time, I remember crying and stroking his side of the sofa as if blurting out my first wish- for him to be home, without thinking twice, without a shadow of doubt. Even the genie cried. Growing up with a sibling is like being the only people on a stranded boat, constantly figuring out how you can live with them and questioning how you could ever live without them.

One evening, in a fit of anger, I told him how I never wanted him to be my brother and he yelled that he didn't ask for it either. The air smelled like kerosene and my chest was filled with arsenic. I was raging and threw his favorite toy aeroplane down the window, 7 stories of guilt and shame. He cried all night and I wanted to cut off my right hand, the hand that hurt my baby brother. I didn't know if he was ever going to forgive me or even talk to me. The next morning at breakfast, he didn't look at me or say a word, I felt like my chest was about to explode and guilt clouded my vision. But then, I felt a hand quietly holding half of an orange my way.

The only people on a stranded boat. How do you live with them? How could you ever live without them?

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire

Anna Billing (1849 - 1927)

for collections i would try:

averno & meadowlands, louise gluck

orpheus & eurydice: a lyric sequence, gregory orr

the world's wife, carol ann duffy

sonnets to orpheus, rainer maria rilke

gilgamesh: a verse play, yusef komunyakaa

autobiography of red, anne carson

mother love, rita dove

ovid at fifteen, christopher bursk (i haven’t read this one yet, but it’s been on my list for a while now)

helen in egypt & hermetic definition, h.d.

some individual ones i’ve loved:

"persephone leaving", mary jo bang

"ceasefire", michael longley

"unicorn", angela carter

"complaint of achilles' heel", charles jensen

"even the gods", nicole sealey

“musée des beaux arts”, w.h. auden

"shapechangers in winter", margaret atwood

"the pomegranate", eavan boland

"odysseus to telemachus", joseph brodsky

"the wedding letter", paul monette

"failing and flying", jack gilbert

"black mythology", jonathan teklit

"and they were both right", kapka kassabova

"mycenae lookout", seamus heaney

“daedalus, after icarus”, saeed jones

"the maenads", ursula k. le guin

"fairy tale", miroslav holub