Corsons Inlet by AR Ammons

I don’t have anything against prose. Write it myself. I give a hearty thumbs up to prose poetry, generally, and have no issue with blurring lines between various art forms. But I dislike prose with linebreaks being sold as a poem. And this work by AR Ammons is prose with linebreaks and fancy pants indentations. It can’t disguise the flat language and the lack of affect.

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Nerve Sequence by James Grinwis

Ever have someone tell you that if you didn’t like a poem, you just didn’t get it? Well, I thought this poem was okay, but the getting it? Not so much. Which means that my “okay” is a highly provisional one and that it’s worth, well, nothing.

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Undid in the Land of Undone by Lee Upton

More prose, but this time at least the words weren’t boring. There’s cleverness here, perhaps the wrong kind, summed up by the final lines:

What I didn’t do took
an eternity —
and it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Yeah, that’s cute.