A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere, including Substack, with a commitment to following a somewhat haphazardly chosen selection of poets, poetry lovers, literary critics and publishers over time. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).

This week: a heady mix of scents, the spaces between pains, shapes that suggest buildings and bodies, a giant plastic tub’s worth of journals, and much more. Enjoy.

The grass has sprung back into shape after plenty of rain and it seems strange to be needing to be cutting it after weeks of watching it turn yellow (and rather crispy) and not need much attention. Pleasingly its flourishing green renewal has renewed my energy for gardening, and I have thoroughly enjoyed being out in the fresh air. I have also enjoyed the scents I have carried with me on my skin as a result of doing some cutting back and weeding. On the first day I smelt of rosemary, on the second lavender, and finally blackcurrants. A heady mix of scents.

I have often been found at my desk this past week squeezing in some extra writing time for the Tea Towel Poems. Those that have been out in the world have received feedback from their recipients, and for those yet to reach a couple celebrating their anniversary I have invited my lovely wife into poetry corner to listen to my drafts. She is good at giving me a succinct and honest reaction and can easily alert me when something I have written only really makes sense in my head. At one point I realised that I could make the necessary tweaks by changing the title of a particular poem. And Kath’s response to the fact it might mean the poem had a long title? “It can’t be any longer than that one about drawers!” Reader, there are drawers in the title of that poem but it’s not just about drawers!
Sue Finch, MARGARINE TUBS OF MARBLES AND ERASERS

秋晴や行きたきところとてもなく　片山由美子

akibare ya yukitaki tokoro totemo naku

            autumn clear sky−
            no particular place
            I would like to go

Yumiko Katayama

from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), October 2025 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 13, 2026)

Temperatures are cooling, but most of our days still have the blue clarity that brings people outdoors, the ideal weather for yard and garage sales. There are lots of them in this mixed neighborhood of homeowners and student renters. I’ve always had conflicting feelings about these sales; to me they signify endings or passages. To others, though, they connote neighborly conviviality. […]

What germ of evil in our past
infected this computer’s sheath,
once beige, now with a yellowish cast
like rotten teeth?

The screw loose and the weak-linked chain:
Nothing in literature or art
so bluntly explicates the line
Things fall apart….

They lie there derelict, unhaggled,
wasted, remaindered, on the skids,
redemptionless. But now a gaggle
of college kids

has blown in on a gale of laughter,
talking trash. May youth forgive
the faults age will no longer suffer!
May these bones live.
Maryann Corbett, Yard Sale Weather

I found my most beloved prose writer, Marguerite Duras. Just saying that feels as though I am a child and my favorite color is blue, or yellow. She is every color. If you know Duras, you know her work and life are things of pain, truly. And also immense passion, contradiction, expression. A constant looking back at childhood, at what is no longer, at the mother wound, the father wound. She told me early on that The Wound is the thing to be obsessed over, stoked, and alchemized. Abandonment, family dysfunction, alcoholism, douleur; these things pervaded her inner world, and she chased them on the page.

I did not expect this, but standing at her tomb, I felt a tenderness toward this woman I have never met and could never truly know. I suppose I wanted to see her grave to ask if she is alright, and to also be tended to by her as a woman and as a writer.

As I moved through the glittering carousel energy of Paris, I imagine her in these streets with her contemporaries, at cafes and bars, creating beauty while she moved through her own shadow. I asked her to bless me.

And then I went to César Vallejo, whose grave is tucked into a row. It is easy to miss, even with directions. Vallejo is the reason I ‘became’ a poet—not just dabbled in it. A friend of mine in college, Lisa, gave me a translated copy of his book Spain Take This Chalice From Me (note: there are other translatons of this title). It became my heart because he taught me the heart of poetry could be difficult, could be violent, could be wild and surreal.

His avant-garde tendencies (he even used automatic writing) and darkness showed me new doorways, new permissions. I was young and didn’t understand the politics of his world then, but I knew the language had a ferocity that could contain and express human suffering. He is the reason I love bold language, strangeness, fucked up syntax, the visceral, the embracing of the ugly and warped and broken. Seeing him moved me deeply. I thanked him profusely. I asked him to bless me.
Lisa Marie Basile, Literary ghosts of Montparnasse cemetery

I am absolutely delighted to share “’To Bear Witness to One’s Own Life’: A Conversation Between Hyejung Kook and Mia Ayumi Malhotra,” published in Poetry Northwest online! I only knew Mia slightly when I agreed to interview her about her latest collection, MOTHERSALT (Alice James Books, 2025), but now, after going back and forth for many months, I feel lucky to have gotten to know her and her work much more deeply. […]

I’m still a year out from my book release, but this feels like a pre-debut of my debut. It’s difficult to concisely sum up a book, but here’s my current attempt: ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH is a collection haunted not only by loss—death and miscarriage most prominently—but also by the tender details of the world, peonies reemerging in spring, the taste of salt licked from your palm, the music of overlapping voices and languages.
Hyejung Kook [no title]

As I enter this new phase in the memoir project, I’m facing a fork in the road, and both roads give me agita. First, I’m spilling my tea to anyone who r...

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