Sam Witt’s first book of poetry, Everlasting Quail, won the Katherine Nason Bakeless First Book Prize in 2000, sponsored by Breadloaf. Everlasting Quail was published by UPNE Press the following year, at which time Witt received a Fulbright Fellowship to live and write in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Witt has participated in poetry festivals at Druskininkai and Vilnius at the invitation […]
It just slipped off my wrist & glinted a last time on its way down, sterling silver disc, cold new moon, disappeared into the waters when I was nine, at the beach. & for weeks after, I could hear my father’s wristwatch ticking, at night, big as the ocean1, as my breathing slowed. . . […]
(for Garrett Scott, November 19, 1969 – March 2, 2006) Those boys, the ones you filmed in Fallujah, they were drowning too. That’s why when they patrol the streets of that desert city in night vision, in your film, I can’t watch it anymore not without feeling this pressure behind my eyes and inside my […]
It was the weight of the child in her belly caused those wings to fail Icarus, in moonlight but then, my heart writhes tonight in skyfuls of falling bodies luminously cold. That’s why each splash of hidden light, in a trick of the eye, comes like a body falling into the sea. Why it projects […]
In my dreams night closes its dirty waters around the apartment complex. Your keys strike each other. They clatter like unoiled machinery, your cheeks coarse with iron-filings. When I lift the dogwood blossom out of water and glass, dripping with the only light in the room, it grows immense, deepens, white as milk around me, […]
Seconds before the explosion, crickets were chewing the thirsty air with their legs, thousands of them together: the air screamed. Silence. A spark could’ve touched the grass off. He was thinking of mother’s forehead, furrowing slightly as the bullet buried itself with a thud in the temple of Chestnut, his childhood horse. He must have […]
Sam Witt talks about the form of his poem “Icarus in Moonlight.”
Sam Witt talks about determining the form a poem will take.