Poem of the Week | July 18, 2016
Sarah Crossland: "Litanies"
This week, we are excited to present a poem by Sarah Crossland. The recipient of the 2012 Boston Review Poetry Prize, a 2013 AWP Intro Journals Award, and the 2013 Pablo Neruda Prize, Crossland has had poems published or forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Shenandoah, FIELD, TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review, A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, and others. She currently lives in Charlottesville, VA, and is at work writing a book of poems about the Romanov daughters and Russian fairy tales called The Winter Palace. You can find more of her poetry at sarahcrossland.com.
Author’s note:
In the summer of 2010, I moved up to Boston for an internship, and—because I was subletting a fully furnished duplex—moved, in a way, into someone else’s life. Coming from a white-walled, cookie-cutter first apartment, I was enamored with the ancient crystal door knobs, the spilling ferns, the bright new Oneida silverware sorted by use in its drawer. It seemed like litanies were everywhere. I wrote the first version of “Litanies” there in that other poet’s dining room, swooning in front of my lone table fan. This is a poem that I have edited, no hyperbole, more than a hundred times. I think of the paradox of Theseus’s Ship: if almost all of the lines of a poem are switched out, discarded, or fitted elsewhere, is the final poem still the same poem I started writing six years ago?
Litanies
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