Ange Mlinko

If you’re a poet, and also a philosopher of language who dotes on the real-world consequence of words, it comes as a shock that words have no bearing, finally, on death. ‘That you can’t edit.’ The great licentiousness of language lies in its counterfactuals: that is its source of invention, in play as well as villainy, but therein also lies Riley’s problem: she can be told her son is dead, she can say it to herself a hundred ways, but words are just that. It’s only with the continuation of his non-return that the fact sinks in.

Swamp cypress candled itself above the waterwhere Nereus’ daughterID’d carnivorous-looking white bloomsand erect scarlet racemesexciting an admiral, plus somesmall yellow species, all sulphur and helium.

She even thought she saw a hummingbirdfeasting on the bells of bright red –less a creaturethan a miniaturetourbillon tweezing a gap in the humdrumspace-time continuum.

My mother, in 1966, is an accessoryatop a Revolutionary War cannon:leopard print coat, buttons undone,legs slimly pressed, bare knees closed –a scene both faded and overexposed.She wasn’t used to winter; vis à visher status as ‘permanent resident alien’,she should have covered up. Pennsylvania …Her brother already drafted in the army.The very picture of a...

One wag​ subtitled it ‘Homer in a Nutshell’. The Batrachomyomachia, or The Battle between the Frogs and the Mice, was thought by the Romans and its early English translators to be a minor work of Homer’s from the eighth or ninth century BC, though its linguistic anachronisms and allusion to Callimachus place it as a likely Hellenistic epyllion. Its three hundred lines in...

After​ reading five hundred pages of Gary Lutz, I opened Google Maps and took a long, hard look at the state where he was born: Pennsylvania, the ‘Keystone State’, although it’s shaped more like a ticket stub fished from a back pocket, is entirely recognisable in his descriptions. ‘I lived in a town that had sourceless light falling over it at all hours.’...