All female writers should strive for this sort of relentless badass take-no-shit attitude to editors who “wish to sit down with them.” Flannery O’Connor spirit-animal post.
natalie eilbert
Natalie Eilbert’s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Tin House, West Branch, Guernica, Spinning Jenny, Bat City Review, The Journal, Devil’s Lake, and many others. She was the finalist …
Discuss.
d/o/l/a/n/ // m/o/r/g/a/n////: I Don’t “Get” Anything/Everything
Like you, I’m a soon-to-be dead person on the planet. All I have left to do is earn a few dollars, eat a few meals, retire and die. Oh, and I’ve also been tasked with making a report on anything/everything at all. This last point is why I’m writing to you now.
Let me backtrack a moment though…
Dolan is the no-shit police.
NPM Daily: Jenny Zhang
Jenny Zhang is the author of the poetry collection, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find (Octopus Books, 2012). Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been published or are forthcoming in Fence, Bomblog, HTMLGIANT, Glimmertrain, Altered Scale, Pen American, Coconut, O’Clock Press,…
“Our compulsions are as heroic as their excesses.” This is a good ‘un.
Misery Trail
I spied eleven lank deer in one evening
feeding on different lots.
I thought a lot of those
whose kindness like a string on a balloon
held me aloft over numerous grasses
but never a grass unforgettable.
And never in the river the same water over a rock.
To be lonely like your hand own. To be so
god damn lonely with just a little information.
I spied a telephone ringing in the distance
between one stalk of corn and another.
At certain times of day the field can blind you.
So I walked, uncharacteristically slow.
You couldn’t know how slow I walked.
—Paige Ackerson-Kiely
This might be the saddest poem I’ve read in a very long time.
(Source: televandalist, via avianarchitext)
NPM Daily: Natalie Eilbert
Natalie Eilbert’s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Tin House, West Branch, Guernica, Spinning Jenny, Colorado Review, Bat City Review, Linebreak, The Journal, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Brooklyn, where she is a founding editor of The Atlas Review (
This is my piece on powerelessness up on the NPM blog.
