Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.

Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.

Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.

Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.

I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm.