misprision, embarrassment, trouble: a new poetry crush

my rad new poetry crush.  

last night in workshop we discussed the second book, you and three others are approaching a lake,  by a poet whose work i've just begun to explore, anna moschovakis. i feel quite an affinity for both her work, it's collaging, collisions, misprisions and erasures,  as well as the experiences she claims as she works in the medium:

"My writing begins most often in the experience of discomfort, lack of mastery, or failure, and the decision to interrogate it in language. This extends to form and approach as much as to content. My poems tend to be long and fall somewhere between poem and essay, challenging the expectations of both but also doubly exposing themselves. And I will let myself inhabit—and attempt to challenge from within—modes I find problematic but too easy to dismiss wholesale: a kind of philosophical introspection in my first book; in my second, both appropriated and invented didacticism; and in my incipient current work, optimism. Like travel to a country whose language I only partially know, these trips are educational—writing becomes a test, an experiment, complete with risks of misprision, embarrassment, trouble."

here's an excerpt from her poem, my life in violence, or death as a way of life, from the drunken boat.  i urge you to read it, and to pick up a copy of you and three others.  

you will regret pas.


"Man dies, that is nothing.

but
            when a woman sits on the edge of her bed, in front of a window, and lets down her red silken hair, threading it through her delicate fingers as it cascades in waves down her porcelain back, which reflects the moon's silvery mood, so that any man privileged enough to catch a glimpse of her falls directly to his knees, blind, lost, panting for breath, choking on words he can't pronounce, starving for familiar phrases he can no longer retrieve from their world of abstraction now that the real thing is manifest before him, so that he vomits up his lunch, his excellent breakfast, and the previous night's dinner, disgusted with anything he saw fit to consume before setting sight on this morsel of perfection, and lies there in half-crazed ecstasy for three days and three long nights, without food or water, his senses damaged to the point of extinction, until he is on the verge of death, and the moon's high silver has fallen to dust, and nobody can help him so nobody tries, and the woman is gone, and her hair is gone, and her porcelain back is gone, and her slender fingers, and even her image is gone, and still he has no regrets, and he welcomes death, invites it, knowing as he's never known anything before that his life wants for nothing

now that is something

heaven
            a sliver "