#sam rasnake

Amo e Canto is Out in the World!

Nearly two years after the announcement that it had won the 2020 Sow’s Ear Poetry Chapbook Prize, my collection Amo e Canto (Italian for I Love and I Sing) has been released.  Because it came out as Issue 30.1 of the Sow’s Ear Poetry Review (and was sent to all subscribers of the Review), it’s not conventionally available for purchase.  However, I am selling extra copies, postage paid, for $13.50…

“If you can empty your own boat / Crossing the river of the world, / No one will oppose you, / No one will seek to harm you.” Chuang Tzu, Chinese philosopher Once, years ago in Maine, I saw an empty boat, staked, waiting, swaying on the marsh pond I’d been walking the edges of. The late afternoon breeze was warm for October. Beyond the tall grass, a car, unseen, swooshed by, headed north on the…

the rings around the outer planets – Pluto’s exempt, of course, since it isn’t one – cream of wheat being stirred on a stove eye, cups of strong coffee, the small, green pencil sharpener I carry with me like a time capsule from a decade that cared – books I’ve carried with me: from Great American Prose Poems to Bellocq’s Ophelia to If Not, Winter to The Sound of Water, Sam Hamill at his finest, I…

            – after Ada Limón I am haunted by what’s missing. Like the man staring out a window at night into the hushed worlds of his neighbors, everything slipping from him, not seeing, but being seen, not recalling details of a life lived, but knowing empty as if it had been his goal all along. I’m haunted by what’s missing. Like streams in a dry summer, or houses overtaken by weeds and bushes…

            “Who are we anymore?”                         – Maureen Langloss, April 2024 It’s dead weight here, rings around an unseen planet, books covered in dust, one broken door refusing to open, the silence of a song lost, forgotten, three empty jars, no lids, the cracked mirror in the drawer, shelves which cannot hold, the old words with their old ideals written on parchment in a museum…

“The kids are all right after all.” – comment from Barbara Jane Reyes to Louie Leyson after students finished comparing/contrasting ‘Glossary of an Aswang’ (Leyson) and ‘Brown Girl Glossary of Terms’ (Reyes) – Twitter (X), 1 December 2023 – after “Poem with Hundreds of Flowers,” by Han VanderHart and “Dear Brown Girl,” by Barbara Jane Reyes Is there ever enough hope as in apple butter spread over…