osoparavos.com

Pip: osoparavos.com is the kind of site where you arrive for one poem and surface three hours later wondering what happened to Tuesday.

Mara: That's the pull of Adam Donaldson Powell's work — and today we're spending the whole episode inside it, moving through a sprawling collection of recent English-language poems that range from intimate confession to political satire to elegy.

Pip: Let's start with the poems themselves — what they're made of, and what they cost.

A life written in layers: the poetry of survival and form

Mara: The anchor here is the long autobiographical poem "as the years went by," which traces a writing life from adolescence through the seventies — not as nostalgia, but as reckoning.

Pip: And the reckoning is right there in the opening lines. Set it up.

Mara: The poem moves from teenage escapism through decades of identity, geography, and survival. By the final stanzas it arrives here: "And now, in my seventies, poetry is no longer something I do. It is no longer an escape born of addiction to survival feats forged in self-inflicted and desired pain, in the pursuit of suffering. My poetry is now who I am. And my brilliance is my honesty."

Pip: That's not a boast. That's a diagnosis — the difference between using writing as a life raft and becoming the water.

Mara: Exactly the arc the poem maps. It moves through bisexuality becoming homosexuality, through multilingualism arriving in layers — Spanish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese — through AIDS activism and public life, all of it eventually composted into something quieter and more essential.

Pip: The companion piece, "A poet's lament," pushes that cost into plain sight — the friendships that thinned, the love that grew tired of knocking. It's the shadow side of the same story.

Mara: It is. And "A poet's lament" names the transaction directly: "Every line I write is paid for in absence. Every metaphor is a moment I did not live, but instead dissected, pinned to a page like a fragile wing."

Pip: So one poem says poetry became identity; the other says identity has a ledger.

Mara: Both are honest about it. The collection doesn't resolve the tension — it holds it. "Spectrum" approaches related territory from a different angle, examining the limits of purely cognitive self-understanding and the soul bonds between living beings that theory alone can't account for.

Pip: Form shifts constantly across this collection. "PILLOW TALK" — nine sections, co-written with Jeanette Skirvin — moves through dream-state, car accident, Kant, insomnia, and lavender fabric softener, all inside the intimacy of a shared bed.

Mara: It's structurally restless in a way that mirrors its subject. "DIRTY TALK" works the opposite end — compressed, urban, the rituals of anonymous desire in a smoky bar. "Erotic Letter" is direct address, sensory and unhurried. "under my skin" is a single image: overturned wine glass, stained carpet, a moment of passion preserved in domestic accident.

Pip: And "crumpled paper" does that in eight lines — blood-stained edges, words of love that were never meant to be written for posterity, just muttered in a moment of passion.

Mara: The shorter poems earn their brevity. "WHITE ROSES" places grief at a grave with worms and fertile soil and the belief that the dead now hold the answers the living are still chasing. "WHILE WE WAIT" is a political poem in the shape of adverbs — patiently, repeatedly, admirably — each one a small indictment.

Pip: "The Death of Poetry" turns the whole enterprise wry: a creative writing teacher who warned of poetry's coming demise now lives in a rest home, telling the same stories on loop, still beloved.

Mara: The irony lands gently. And "an apologia of identity: the hunger that refuses taming" is the collection's most forensic self-examination — a long poem about desiring men who won't yield, and the uncomfortable arithmetic of what that costs.

Pip: It names Genet and Mishima as private saints of a very particular liturgy.

Mara: And then turns on itself: "Control is a poor substitute for conquest. Domestication is the death of desire. I have turned wolves into housepets, and then wondered why they would not bite."

Pip: The wit there is doing real work — it's not a joke, it's a confession wearing irony as camouflage.

Mara: Several poems zoom out from the personal to the political. "The Trump years" is a series of compressed tableaux — stock markets, shuttered Main Streets, border separations, eroding alliances — rendered in tight quatrains without naming names. "Fictional letter to Putin" takes the opposite approach: intimate, epistolary, a 96-year-old Russian woman named Anya writing to her Vova with weary, heartbroken directness.

Pip: "Keeping up appearances" is a limerick sequence about an influencer whose Maldives backdrop is a green screen and whose Paris view is a lighting technique.

Mara: It fits the collection's pattern of using form as argument — the limerick's bouncy constraint performing the very artifice it's mocking. "the cage is beautiful; the lie is ugly" makes the same critique at full length: beauty culture, social media performance, the machinery of inadequacy. It ends with something stubborn — "a primitive ache for unpurchased joy."

Pip: Which is also where "Be Here Now" arrives, from a different direction — chronic illness, pain as lantern rather than tyrant, and the mind slipping free to dance when the body gets too loud.

Mara: "walking the blood clot" and "check mate" approach the same medical reality with different registers. "walking the blood clot" is long, Beat-inflected, almost raucous — the speaker walking his inoperable clot three times daily, writing poems in his head loud enough to drown the electric screaming in his legs. "check mate" is haiku sequence, each image a move in a silent war with no winner.

Pip: One poem shouts at the body; the other bows to it.

Mara: "Old Man Walking" observes from the outside — a man with a crutch measuring distance in decisions, not meters. It's patient and precise, and it ends simply: he has crossed the block twice, he has not fallen, for today this is enough.

Pip: "Survivor's Guilt" is the collection's most direct elegy — New York in the AIDS years, a friend whose voice became a hallway the speaker couldn't follow, the city now humming without him like a jukebox missing its best song.

Mara: And "Dear Body" is a prose-poem letter to the self — the mind addressing the body as Brother, proposing a truce after decades of feuding, asking whether they can enter aging as the supportive couple they were always meant to be.

Pip: "Epitaph" closes that arc: measure me not in the noise I made, but in the warmth I kept alive between myself and another.

Mara: Several poems work in extended formal structures. "Four sonnets inspired by Vivaldi's Four Seasons" moves through spring's pastoral ease, summer's building storm, autumn's harvest and hunt, and winter's brittle music — each sonnet matching Vivaldi's emotional register with its own. "Somnambulist Winter" is a single long poem tracing the same seasonal arc as interior weather.

Pip: "the buffet of words" is a comic inventory of language itself — one-dollar words, fifty-dollar words, forbidden words under fine cloths, needle-words served hot at tables where affection withdrew.

Mara: It ends at the register: "you pay in consequences for each phrase you pursue." Which is, quietly, the thesis of the whole collection.

Pip: "The Tunnel at the End of Time" is the collection's most ambitious piece — angels, rebels, anti-fascists, and AIs converging under an airport on a mission to prevent a totalizing future, told in formal verse with an epic's scope.

Mara: It's a political allegory that earns its length. The resolution isn't a victory but an opening: "no tunnel owns the fate of every soul. The path is many, shifting, granular — no hand may rightfully command the whole."

Pip: "a polyglot's hell" is the palate cleanser — a linguist who speaks seven languages reduced to stammering "bonjour" when coworkers demand a performance.

Mara: "The raeraes" is a short, observational portrait of two Polynesian transgender women at a bar, watching tourists react with shock or admiration, finding their real favorites among the muscular men whose self-conscious nods confirm a sense of interpersonal intrigue.

Pip: "Between Two Worlds" takes the collection's social conscience to Rio — a fine restaurant four blocks from sleeping bodies on cardboard, a waiter who says, almost in a whisper, that it's customary to give leftovers to the poor on your way home.

Mara: And "The discussion" finds something similar in Florianópolis — an Argentine and a Brazilian trading grievances in a restaurant until a waitress arrives with two unasked-for beers and the observation that they already sound married. By midnight they're sharing cigarettes and calling each other hermano.

Pip: "the gringo and apartment 302" plays the same cross-cultural tension as farce — a European renter discovering that "fully equipped apartment" in Brazil is an advanced philosophical concept, and that the landlord's leaking wall is simply "part of luck."

Mara: "Imagine (NYC)" and "Imagine (San Francisco)" form a diptych of urban enclosure — one a long, dense, nocturnal catalog of the city's cages from roach-lit studios to penthouse prisons, the other a short, wry fantasy about a modest sanctuary that turns out, on reflection, to be a zoo.

Pip: "Saturn's blues," "Nighthawk," and "what if i linger when all else have fled" round out the collection's range — a blues poem about cyclical hardship, a nocturnal soundscape of cricket tribes and a vigilant nighthawk, and a formal meditation in archaic diction on the strange terror of outliving everyone you love.

Mara: "somniloquy about sleep negotiations with myself" splits into two modes — insomnia as feral sheep and tightening wire, uncontrolled sleep as ambush and theft. "surrender" is four haiku sequences on love, self, life, and death. "a hunger fed by stolen hours" is a Shakespearean sonnet about desire that survives on stolen time. "don't ask" closes things with a sharp, sardonic warning: my anti-social disposition is intended to protect you from us.

Pip: That last line is the collection in miniature — honesty dressed as deflection, or maybe deflection dressed as honesty.

Mara: Which is where the poems keep arriving, from every direction — the question of what we reveal, what we protect, and what the writing finally costs us.

Pip: What stays with me is the range — elegy and limerick, epic allegory and eight-line confession, all insisting on the same thing: that language has consequences you pay for later.

Mara: And that survival, in all its forms, is worth the invoice. Next time, more from osoparavos.com.