on life (and other things)

The Sealey Challenge: The Morning You Saw a Train of Stars Streaking Across the Sky

CooXooEii Black’s The Morning You Saw a Train of Stars Streaking Across the Sky, 2021 Rattle Chapbook Prize winner, is a poetics of family, of Indigeneity, and of Afro-Indigenousness. Sometimes it’s a mourning song, and sometimes it’s more a wink and a nudge, and always, it is both beautiful and powerful. We know immediately, from the title of the first poem of the collection, that … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: The Morning You Saw a Train of Stars Streaking Across the Sky

archerh2
on the page

The Sealey Challenge: Deathbed Sext

Christopher Salerno’s Deathbed Sext, 2019 winner of the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, is strange and tender and funny, an exploration of masculinity and mortality and urban life that also explores all sorts of new possibilities for sexting. Parts of Deathbed Sext are overtly horrific, carrying violence like a torn and bloodied flag. The first poem in the collection, “Headfirst,” which follows a boy who’s … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Deathbed Sext

archerh2
on the page

The Sealey Challenge: Machete Moon

Somehow, without quite realizing it, this has become a summer of faith through the books of the Sealey Challenge. Not the sort of faith you’d hear in a church, to be sure—or at any rate, not most churches—but a faith true and pure all the same. Parts of Arielle Cottingham’s Machete Moon, published in 2022 as an e-chap by Sundress Publications, feel like a prayer. … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Machete Moon

archerh2
on the page

The Sealey Challenge: In America

The first time I saw Diana Goetsch’s In America—both online, at its Rattle home, and in the flesh—I saw the Statue of Liberty giving the world the finger, and mentally shrugged. It seemed very understandable, especially after what we’ve seen, and where we are now. When I actually pause, howeer, and look fully at that cover photo, I realize I’m seeing it wrong: our great … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: In America

archerh2
on life (and other things)

The Sealey Challenge: The Fight Journal

John W. Evans’ The Fight Journal, winner of the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Prize and published by Rattle in 2023 (the first chapbook of my Rattle subscription, in fact!), pulled me in from uncomfortable beginning and held me through bittersweet ending. It’s a sad, difficult book: it is, after all, about divorce. I think it’s also about mental illness, and gendering. But I also think I … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: The Fight Journal

archerh2
on the page

The Sealey Challenge: Lessons in Bending

Jonaki Ray’s Lessons in Bending, one of Sundress Publications’ 2023 e-chaps1, is a lesson in the heartbreak and desperate hope of humanity. Lessons in Bending leaves me with so, so many questions. Several of the poems here are dedicated to someone: “Lessons in Bending” is dedicated to K, “You Will Be Saved” for Rose Williams, “99” for T. I want to know who they are, … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Lessons in Bending

archerh2
on the page

The Sealey Challenge: The Seven Ages

I am not entirely sure I understood Louise Glück’s The Seven Ages. It is deeply interior, and built around summer—as a season, and as a concept—and, well, I’ve never much cared for summer. But though it was originally published in 2002, there are moments that feel almost frightfully prescient, and, in the midst of summer musings, there are sparks of intense beauty. Glück’s “Civilization,” like … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: The Seven Ages

archerh2
on the page

The Sealey Challenge: Gazing Down On It

Lauren de Sá Naylor’s Gazing Down On It, published in 2022 by Ugly Duckling Presse, is strange and surreal, a dreamscape of neoliberalism and gender and COVID-19. Because this is, very much, (prose) poetry of the COVID era. When I say that this is a dreamscape of neoliberalism, I mean both that this is a poetics of dreams in which the word “neoliberalism” gets used … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Gazing Down On It

archerh2
on life (and other things)

The Sealey Challenge: Sing Me a Lesser Wound

Junious Ward’s Sing Me a Lesser Wound, the tiniest of chapbooks, number 42 (2020) of Bull City Press‘s charming Inch series (yes, it is an inch by an inch by an inch!), is astonishing in all the best ways. (Also, hi guys, I’m back! I’ve got a backlog and I still have the migraine that’s had me crawling for the past four days!) Ward is … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Sing Me a Lesser Wound

archerh2
on the page

The Sealey Challenge: And God Created Women

I was not always sure, as I read Connie Voisine’s And God Created Women, published in 2018 by Bull City Press, exactly what Voisine was doing, or exactly what she meant. But I was damn well sure of her anger. I could feel it simmering under every word. And God Created Women is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a woman’s story. Or maybe it’s women’s stories, plural, the … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: And God Created Women

archerh2