Fulfilling my obligations to my long-neglected TBR one book a time. Want to know why? I explain it in the first post here. Posting striking lines daily on BlueSky

For this, my final post before I take a 2 week summer vacation, I’m going to rave about a sequence of three poems by Sarah M. Sala that appear in the January/February 2024 issue of Poetry. “Migraine as Whale” A Triptych” is an extremely clever and equally moving set of erasure poems. Or rather, one very moving poem with two erasure poems, the third digging deeper than and closer to the core than the second.

It is a seriously great idea, expertly executed. The first poem is printed as poems usually are. The second poem has some words standing out in bold from the rest of the poem which appears in 50% grayscale. The third poem leaves different words from the second printed normally, with a few words in the line preceding or following the normal words printed in 25% grayscale AND the punctuation (periods and commas) left screened at normal weight.

The effect is stunning and genius! Narrative poetry moving into visual poetry, clarifying, amplifying, expanding, exploring the meanings in its narrative progenitor. Why didn’t I think of doing this? Imagine the possibilities!

If you follow me over on BlueSky you already know that I post lines I find striking every day as I slowly read through one book or issue each week. I do now want to spoil the effect of you reading this triptych in the magazine, but I do want to leave you with a little teaser from the first tych to encourage you to track this work down and see what it becomes. This is what is driving my creativity this week:

When you confess your new body to a colleague
at the elevator bank, she says, but you don’t look sick.