Elaine Sexton is the author of three collections of poems, Prospect/Refuge (Sheep Meadow Press, 2015); Causeway (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2008); and Sleuth (New Issues, 2003). Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous journals including American Poetry Review, ARTnews, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Women’s Review of Books, the Writer’s Chronicle (AWP), and online with Poetry Daily.
Always a bad sign people on the sidewalk looking up. A crowd forms, cars slow then stop, people on the sidewalk looking up. I step into the pool of them then stop. I gape like the others. I step into the pool of them, become the pool and gape like the others. Mothers, peddlers, suits […]
She is perfectly ordinary, a cashmere scarf snugly wrapped around her neck. She is a middle age that is crisp, appealing in New York. She is a brain surgeon or a designer of blowdryers. I know this because I am in her skin this morning riding the bus, happy to be not young, happy to […]
Let’s thank our mistakes, let’s bless them for their humanity, their terribly weak chins. We should offer them our gratitude and admiration for giving us our clefts and scarring us with embarrassment, the hot flash of confession. Thank you, transgressions! for making us so right in our imperfections. Less flawed, we might have turned away, […]
Ten years later I could swear the old orange spreads are now curtains. We traded our double in back for more light and this view. The narrow single beds are brand new and we push them together, a familiar gesture, the first night. The chambermaids are used to this. They smooth out the sheets every […]
Our friends wanted us to taste everything: their dust and sweet air, their mangy Mexican dogs, and banana leaves floating, botanical, architectural. Here, they trade mostly roses, fields and fields of their bodies for sale in red bundles like firewood on the road. Here, where the barb in the barbed wire fence caught me, onions […]
Elaine Sexton, author of the collection Sleuth (New Issues Press, 2003), and the forthcoming Causeway (New Issues, Spring 2008), talks about the greatest obstacle she faced in becoming a poet.
Elaine Sexton, author of the collection Sleuth (New Issues Press, 2003), and the forthcoming Causeway (New Issues, Spring 2008), talks about the genesis of her poem, Lower Manhattan Pantoum.