Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman:
This concrete poem wowed me as I read through Christopher Nelson’s submission. When I heard that it’s from the same project as two of his poems we published in Issue 20.1, “Memory” and “Mind,” I wasn’t surprised. In addition to that initial “m,” the three poems all are stark and unflinching in their rhetoric. Here, Nelson looks at the experience of mental illness in a complex, gripping way.
Listen to Nelson read “Mirror”:
Mirror
Text of above:
many
believe madness to be
a doubling, or more, of
identity, a self in shards
but it’s an entering ::
choose: fog, maze
brightness, penumbra
shit storm, shit
show, palace of
the greased hand, where
only or where if-ly or
why I became
only what I always was
but horribly, fully
take it, the mirror
wants its kiss, take it, I’ve been
patient for the real words
Christopher Nelson is the author of Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and four chapbooks, including Blue House, winner of a Poetry Society of America Fellowship. The recipient of the 2023–24 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, he is the founding editor of Green Linden Press. Visit christophernelson.info.
