Green Linden Press

Kristi Maxwell’s 2023 collection Goners won the third annual Wishing Jewel Prize. Here are two poems from the collection.

The poems of Goners are lipograms, an ancient form that demands certain letters be excluded when writing, in Maxwell’s case, the letters comprising the names of endangered animals. As she describes, “The poem ‘Cheetah,’ for instance, uses 21 of 26 letters, all but a, c, e, h, and t, so no articles, no cats, no being, no are or were or was, no choice, etc. (no etc.).” In the context of the corrosive effects of imperialism and  industrialization, Goners questions the common practice of elegizing and employs an alternative mode. The animals in the titles are absent from the poems—they’re gone. Instead, in a haunting gesture, the poems foreground the role anthropocentrism plays in the sixth extinction underway.

Cheetah
an extinction

ominous door, missing doorknob good squirm
no x guns down y I know loss’s idiom

fumbling girl: moon-limb idolizing puddling milk— 
slimy rug sloppy slip slipping on

no gown, no skull ring I’d go for being
ivy bullying building’s walls I’d go for being

Ovid’s vigorous word-body unfolding, giving voids form
sitting gods down mudpuppy in mud, kingly minnows  

my lord-gripping kinfolk snub us no sizing up
or upsizing

your briny boys, lungs, filling—
donning wings of lung, un-ill, unknowing us

numbing

Our loop unloops 

Gibbon
an extinction

dream up after
dream dread’s dug-up acre

a farmed heart freed of tree-matter
all that fell

heap three, heap twelve

ump my lack
make the call

*

fear-caulked hurt acted a crutch

that weep made a puffy jacket what we had
called a face

quarrel-laced allure temper deferred

very adult—that clam-wet ache, that late datum

where a cell that had a healthy crew ruled

revelry actually a rematch a daydream

revery, a vacuum 

Kristi Maxwell is the author of eight books of poems, including Goners (Green Linden Press, 2023), winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize; My My (Saturnalia Books, 2020); Realm Sixty-four (Ahsahta Press, 2008), editor’s choice for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and finalist for the National Poetry Series; and Hush Sessions (Saturnalia, 2009), editor’s choice for the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She’s an associate professor of English at the University of Louisville. Kristi holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Arizona.  

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2023