I wiped the last men from my shelvesI didn’t know I was already done with gathering untojackets and books and even an aromaI dragged across the centurycollecting dust and some tacky filmtrinkets of a life I threw awayeverything I had and knewand even some of the things I likedbut oh I could never throwaway a thing I lovenothing I have lovedhas been that light * I do so love a sad red barnthe lassitude of a barof soap empty patof butter on the staira lasting warm remarklike a country mousewith its tail in its mouthI fall asleep in the fieldwith my hand around my throatto suffer lilies aloneconfusing my own smellfor the pasture
Two Poems
Stella Corso
Feature Date
- November 11, 2023
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“Two Poems” from GREEN KNIFE: by Stella Corso.
Published by Rescue Press on October 24, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Stella Corso.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Stella Corso is the author of Green Knife (Rescue Press, 2023) and TANTRUM (Rescue Press, 2017), selected by Douglas Kearney for the Black Box Prize for Poetry, along with chapbooks Taboo Vivant (blush, 2022) and Wind & the Augur (Sixth Finch, 2021). She is a founding member of the Connecticut River Valley Poets’ Theater (CRVPT) and the current Managing Editor of Denver Quarterly and FIVES. Read more here: https://www.stella-corso.com
"Stella Corso's Green Knife is an investigation into the world as an artefact of thinking or an investigation into thinking as something made by the world as a whole. The book's ostensible subject is art and the humans who precede and follow it in time—and, again, the obverse: the objects that oscillate in semi-permanence around the ephemeral human host. With its double blade of incision and bluntness, Stella Corso's Green Knife could be made of anything—the whole world, vision, light."
—Joyelle Mcsweeney
"Stella Corso is a flâneuse who stays news. Fine, dandy, and refreshingly anti-social, the work herein is erotic, ekphrastic ear candy for the side-eyeing, bittersweet aesthete in all of us."
—Graham Foust
"In the spirit of Agnes Varda's Vagabond, this knife grinder meanders from graze into trespass, slurps soup at the street-facing countertop, watches other women powerwalking and just can't (or won't) get out of the way. I encountered this sibylline book like a one-night stand with a priestess demoted for falling asleep on the job and being devoted to another kind of sensitivity: it worked itself into my soft tissue, it made me remember things I had once sacrificed but long forgot, and it made me look at my daily life with new disgust and applause."
—Valerie Hsiung
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