What if someone offered you hard-earned wisdom about life? Would you listen? Jesse Lee Kercheval’s latest collection of poetry, I Want to Tell You: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series) is a gorgeous examination of grief, death, God, silence, place, and dogs. Kercheval’s “voicey voice” (her words) presses us to learn from her mistakes so we can be spared…

THE SPIRITUAL FACT OF OUR ONENESS: A CONVERSATION WITH CHARIF SHANAHAN BY DIANE GOTTLIEB April 3rd, 2023 Charif Shanahan’s second poetry collection, Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023) is a stunning tryptic that powerfully explores themes of mixed-race identity, time, mortality, and queer love. At the center of the collection is the poem, “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a…

I’d always avoided thrift shops. I never wanted used clothes. I feared absorbing a stranger’s energy. Maybe she was an anxious stranger, or angry, unkind, depressed. Maybe she was dead. I didn’t want to take that chance. Even after I’d laundered the clothing, some part of the past would remain in the weave. https://www.riverteethjournal.com/blog/2023/03/19/river-teeth-issue-preview-242

When the aides on the night shift drift off to sleep, residents jump out of bed. Tiptoe down hallways to the recreation room. First one in hits the lights. Read more

The Best 22-Word Poems Of 2022     ( 1st Prize)   The Only Thing Left was his smell. Buried in his collar, dank, musk after rain. Read more  

How much time do you spend pondering your breath? Maybe a lot if you meditate or practice yoga. Probably quite a bit when your sinuses are clogged or if your respiratory system is compromised. Otherwise though, breath, is not something most people think about very often. It’s automatic. A regular, automatic miracle. Gayle Brandeis’s Drawing…

We held hands, father and I, Saturday nights, as we skipped down 108th Street to the newsstand. We bought the early edition of the Sunday Times and a Hershey bar. How I loved getting drunk off the newsprint, the rank smell of almost-dry ink, the way black bled onto my fingers. Read more

How many of us appreciate the miracle that is our breath? Appreciate our bodies—our whole bodies, including our curves, our folds, our very flesh? What do breath, the body, and our feelings about both, have to do with writing anyway? If you were to ask Gayle Brandeis what breath and the body have to do…

Diane Gottlieb: At the Public Library— Surrounded by the Likely –after Megan Fernandes I am being interrogated by all the things I do not believe in. But even in this room where our thoughts are still free, where the musty smell of page upon page bound hard between covers or paperbacks, especially here, I feel…

We’re living in trying, maddening, exhausting times. I often find myself at a loss as to what to do with all the anger and fear. Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo channeled hers into poetry, and the resulting book, Catastrophic Molting, is a brilliant, impassioned, and urgent collection. Shimshon-Santo introduces the book with a poem titled “declaration,” her acknowledgment…