Brooklyn NY: I’m just now working through American writer and editor Andy Butter’s debut chapbook, To Circumambulate A Sacred Lake (Brooklyn NY: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2025), a curious and extended chapbook-length lyric meditation. Butter has a good sense of the extended lyric, the long line, stretching out as far as possible across multiple pages, which almost makes me wonder if this poem is (or will be, or can be) far more than what is presented here, within the boundaries of this particular chapbook-sized unit. If Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior” was attending the space of that landscape, so too, Butter’s poem, providing a similar shape through articulating an outline, slow and careful and almost delicate. As the poem, subtitled “[Allowing the materials their errors]” begins: “Here is where I start after ending. We walked, turned and touched. / Here we held and the trees of paradise lurched.”
We ran around Lake Superior—the center of the universe.
Our footprints a pearl-string of pressurized gravity wells.
We ran through rain, through broad open glades,
nights we knew the moon was near.
Rising as incense in a cathedral, slow and sluggish,
our voices tittered like old monks. In minutiae, in daily minuets,
within minutes skin sloughing and the egress of love,
we slept beneath the shroud of mosquitoes a buzz thin as muslin.
Poland/Texas: It is curious to see more work from Polish poet, literary critic and performer Maria Cyranowicz, translated into English from the Polish by translator Malgorzata Myk, as the chapbook a species of least concern (El Paso TX: Toad Press/Veliz Books, 2024), as generously passed along from the translator (and through Polish poet, translator and critic Kacper Bartczak, recently in town for VERSeFest). The poems hold themselves as accumulations of long thought-lines, set as one foot following another, into a depth or a darkness or a particle of light. “and then I understood,” begins the poem “funeral,” “I am Alexander and he is Fanny / it’s me who is following still following the absent father / I keep saying damn it or much worse / smiling through my teeth to those stroking my [.]” As part of a folio of eight Polish poets at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics from 2024, Cyranowicz writes: “To me, language is a social construct inside of which the speaker of my poetry is bound to be trapped and to which they are frequently subjected. Linguistic conditioning, which entails the socialization of individuals to such ‘delusions’ as religion, education, politics, or even literature, does not proceed without oppression.”
the forty third sunset
watched by the Little
Prince
when I open my eyes the
sun is still shining,
a small rusty orb close to
the evening;
I’m turning it in my
thoughts like a hot potato,
it’s setting too fast
beyond the thin line of eyelids.
the horizon fills with
blood. I can’t not look.
I touch it with my eyes:
it’s pulsing. I smile a little.
I’m trying hard to feel
less sad.
I’m rubbing eyelids with
my fingers and I don’t feel
reluctance in me, only
astonishment.
there’s something beyond
this line. there’s something in this color.
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