Featured Poetry
I’ve just read through this week this very new, just released poetry collection Quarantine Highway by Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American poet living in California.
I recommend this poetry book to anyone who enjoys a poetry style that feels almost to be part on the page and partly recited, with poems that approach everyday subjects with eloquent honesty and complexity, but also very naturally said.
These poems have the feel of free verse poetry, yet often with a ‘wrapped up repetition’ of very concise words in a short phrase, in each poem that ends the poem, and moves the subject into all experience, rather than simply ending in the most specific situation stated in the poem. There is a type of relaxed rhythm or form in that.
The poems often at their core are about separation and the devastation of separation, and I find anyone grieving, sad, or wanting to face injustice, may like to read this poetry book. The poems are connected to a hinted community in the way that many poems after the title of the poem contain a line like, “From a line by [author’s name]” and in that, the isolation a poem may express contains unity and community in having been written as if replies to these previous poems, authors, or works.
A quote I enjoyed from the collection: “We were rolling down the street / Listening to Beethoven / And drumming the side of the open / Window with our feet / Hanging outside / As we turned through the fields of / Almond groves stupidly…We ran afoul of the flames / That we were running towards.” I was glad to be introduced to this poet and happy she had generously sent me a copy of this poetry book just released, Quarantine Highway by Millicent Borges Accardi.
Jade
Blush of Dawn 