For the love of prose poetry

My poem "Hat Box" is up at The Prose-Poem Project. You can check it out online or, if you like prose poetry and want to support a fantastic journal, order the print version when the Spring issue is released in April.

I actually wrote "Hat Box" several years ago when I first discovered the prose poem and the way it often fuses the surreal and the mundane. (Which my poem attempts to do.) The first writer to really introduce me to this delicious combination of violence, beauty, and truth, prose and poetry, was Joel Brouwer, and his Centuries (a collection of fifty prose poems that are each a hundred words long) remains one of my favorite poetry collections. For those of you who are unfamiliar with prose poetry, I'll leave you today with one of my favorites from Centuries.

"Aesthetics"
by Joel Brouwer

Your brother has leukemia? Carve ivory. The elections were rigged? Write a villanelle. A girl shivers in streetlight, takes off her mittens, pulls a silver yo-yo from her pocket. Dogs bark behind a fence. Use oil on wood. Concentrate on pacing when choreographing your divorce; you will have to move through it forever. Two men in green fatigues tie a woman flat to a metal table. One has a rubber hose, the other a pliers. A third man arrives with sandwiches and a thermos. A body has soft and hard parts, like a piano. Music comes from where they meet.