Philip Metres

"Sand Opera emerges from the dizzying position of being named but unheard as an Arab American, and out of the parallel sense of seeing Arabs named and silenced since 9/11. Polyvocal poems, arias, and redacted text speak for the unheard. Metres exposes our common humanity, while investigating the dehumanizing perils of war and its lasting effect on our culture"--

Sand Opera

Michael P. Murphy

Jim Daniels

Orlando Ricardo Menes

Maryann Corbett

Pat Brisson

Joshua Hren

Kim Bridgford

Daye Phillippo

Sheryl St. Germain

Mike Aquilina

Kathleen Marks

Susan Signe Morrison

Stephen Gibson

Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner

Susan L. Miller

Barbara Crooker

Paul Willis

Dean Kostos

Pablo Medina

Gail White

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Lynn Domina

Jeremiah Webster

Ned Balbo

Richard Cole

Jerry Harp

George Klawitter

C. X. Dillhunt

Julie L. Moore

Debra Bruce

James Matthew Wilson

D. S. Martin

Maryanne Hannan

Leonard Kress

Margaret Rozga

Joseph Bathanti

Richard Spilman

Tyler Farrell

Sharif Elmusa

Chelsea Martinez-Casiano

P. S. Dean

Alan Berecka

Tim Bete

Kathleen Bradley

Mary Buchinger

Roxana L. Cazan

Yuan Changming

Erica Charis-Molling

Joanna Currey

Jessica G. de Koninck

Dominic Gideon

Ed Granger

Lois Marie Harrod

Anne M. Higgins

Thomas Holahan

Siham Karami

Elaine Kehoe

Michael Angel Martin

Rhonda Miska

Robin Amelia Morris

Elizabeth Murawski

Stella Nesanovich

Matthew C. Nickel

Barry Peters

Mia Pohlman

Christopher Poore

Dennis Rhodes

Michael D. Riley

Lisa Toth Salinas

Nicholas Samaras

Janna Schledorn

Rita A. Simmonds

Sofia M. Starnes

Sophia Stid

Carole Stone

Maxine Susman

Maria Terrone

Brian Volck

Mark C. Watney

R. Bratten Weiss

Aleisa Zoecklin

Cydnee Devereaux

Jake Oresick

Mary Ladany

Juditha Dowd

Shanna Powlus Wheeler

Mia Schilling Grogan

New poems, translations, interviews, and book reviews in a yearly literary journal for Catholic Poetry.

: a Journal of Catholic Poetry

Presence

Shrapnel Maps

Whether Thersites in Homer’s Iliad, Wilfred Owen in “Dulce et Decorum Est,” or Allen Ginsberg in “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” poets have long given solitary voice against the brutality of war. The hasty cancellation of the 2003 White House symposium “Poetry and the American Voice” in the face of protests by Sam Hamill and other invited guests against the coming “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq reminded us that poetry and poets still have the power to challenge the powerful. Behind the Lines investigates American war resistance poetry from the Second World War through the Iraq wars. Rather than simply chronicling the genre, Philip Metres argues that this poetry gets to the heart of who is authorized to speak about war and how it can be represented. As such, he explores a largely neglected area of scholarship: the poet’s relationship to dissenting political movements and the nation. In his elegant study, Metres examines the ways in which war resistance is registered not only in terms of its content but also at the level of the lyric. He proposes that protest poetry constitutes a subgenre that—by virtue of its preoccupation with politics, history, and trauma—probes the limits of American lyric poetry. Thus, war resistance poetry—and the role of what Shelley calls unacknowledged legislators—is a crucial, though largely unexamined, body of writing that stands at the center of dissident political movements.

War Resistance Poetry on the American Home Front Since 1941

Behind the Lines

Writing into the wounds and reverberations of the Israel/Palestine conflict, Philip Metres’ fourth book of poems, Shrapnel Maps, is at once elegiac and activist, an exploratory surgery to extract the slivers of cartography through palimpsest and erasure. A wedding in Toura, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, uneasy interactions between Arab and Jewish neighbors in University Heights, the expulsion of Palestinians in Jaffa, another bombing in Gaza: Shrapnel Maps traces the hurt and tender places, where political noise turns into the voices of Palestinians and Israelis. Working with documentary flyers, vintage postcards, travelogues, cartographic language, and first person testimonies, Shrapnel Maps ranges from monologue sonnets to prose vignettes, polyphonics to blackouts, indices to simultaneities, as Palestinians and Israelis long for justice and peace, for understanding and survival.

Wrestling with the questions of travel, memory, and perception, Pictures at an Exhibition: A Petersburg Album is, at its core, an unrequited love song to St. Petersburg. The fever dream of Peter the Great, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Akhmatova, St. Petersburg is the occasion for a broader meditation on all we come to love and lose. Pictures began as a journal notebook in 2002, as the poet tried to capture this spectacle-rich and memory-laden city that he had visited ten years before. Scored to the movements of Modest Mussorgsky's legendary suite--a work of art elegizing a lost friend, the artist Hartmann--Pictures marks, and sometimes sings, the incommensurability of word and world.

A Petersburg Album

Pictures at an Exhibition

Philip Metres

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