Congratulations to CMT member Sarah Howe, whose dazzling poetic collection Loop of Jade is winning prize after prize–yesterday it took the T.S. Eliot, the first debut ever to do so. As a taste of its riches, here is a particularly material-textual poem, which takes its curious title from Borges:

(n) That from a long way off look like flies

More a midge really, flower-pressed: pent
in this hinged spread of my undergrad
Shakespeare. Down the page, a grey smudge
tinged with a rusty penumbra, like blood–
mine or its? Two sheer wings, stilled mid-word,
trace out a glyph in a strange alphabet.

At empathy’s darkening pane we see
our own reflected face: how, if that fly
had a father and mother? On the heath, Lear
assumes all ragged madmen share
ungrateful daughters. The way my father,
In his affable moods, always thinks you
want a gin and tonic too. I wonder
if I should scrape her off with a tissue.