Those who live to have it andthose who live to give it.Of course there are those for whom both are true,but never in the same measure.Those who have it to give arelike cardinals in the snow. So easyand beautifully lit. Someare rabbits. Hard to seeexcept for those who would prey upon them:all that softness and quaking and blood.Those who want itcannot be satisfied. Eagle-eyed and such talons,any furred thing will do. So easyto rip out a heart when it is throbbing so hard.I wander out into the winter.I know what I am.
I’ve Been Thinking about Love Again
Vievee Francis
Feature Date
- May 20, 2022
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Copyright © 2022 by Vievee Francis.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Vievee Francis is the author of The Shared World, which is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press; Forest Primeval, winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award; Horse in the Dark, winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly. She is the recipient of the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. A recipient of the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, she is currently an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
Spring 2022
Sewanee, Tennessee
University of the South
Editor
Adam Ross
Managing Editor & Poetry Editor
Eric Smith
Assistant Editors
Hellen Wainaina
Jennie Vite
Founded in 1892 by the teacher and critic William Peterfield Trent, the Sewanee Review is the longest-running literary quarterly in America. The SR has published many of the twentieth century’s great writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore, Seamus Heaney, Hannah Arendt, and Ezra Pound. The Review has a long tradition of cultivating emerging talent, from excerpts of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor’s first novels to the early poetry of Robert Penn Warren, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Christian Wiman. “Whatever the new literature turns out to be,” wrote editor Allen Tate in 1944, “ it will be the privilege of the Sewanee Review to print its share of it, to comment on it, and to try to understand it.” The mission remains unchanged.
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