Poetry Only: Hair
Spring 2017 · Vol. 39 No. 4
This Poetry Only issue features poetry about hair. The thirty-six voices collected in this issue offer a fantastical tangle of the tresses: Tracy Hamon tests relational trimmings and partings in “Examination”; Tanis MacDonald’s “Shornography” texturizes with edge; Chloë Catán cuts with teeth. From the fine, almost imperceptible hairs in Donna J. Gelagotis Lee’s “Hot Breath” to the grainy snares in Seren Gagne’s “Porcelain Clown,” hair is both process and memory, barrier and passage. These are poems that listen across bodies and botanies, creatures and lands, teasing the cultural through to the elemental and back again.
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- The natural More peace than politics, forgo the heat / and hostile alkali for what curls itself out of me / / dense as ...
- Be/st Frie/nds Cross-legged in rows on sleeping bags. When asked, her Truths don’t excite. / They shrug, unconcerned, make ...
- Locks he pulls out a stick of eyeliner, / his rat tail has bloomed / into locks / thick as dark feathers / / ...
- road race, Christmas day (for Alex Decoteau) / a photo, 1910. / Edmonton before / the war. / some version / of the same cold / streets. / same ...
- Examination In which position is the comb held when tapering the hair with clippers? / a) above the wingspan of a northern ...
- Cadence, Country, Silence Night catch in the Atacama / is Brancusi’s sleeping muse. / My dad’s panama hat / is extinct. / / ...