The Cartoon & Poem Supplement

"That’s not fair."

Poems:

“Crossing Byways” by Yusef Komunyakaa: I don’t always vibe with – or, maybe, fully understand – Komunyakaa’s super uninflected, drifting, optical style. This is par for the course – what we’re meant to get from the speaker’s fairly mundane encounter with a pit bull and its “coward” owner, I’m not totally sure – something to do with complicity and servitude, perhaps? It removes the vigorous quality I like in diary poetry (e.g. Frank O’Hara), and replaces it with an arched eyebrow that seems like it wants to convey something – some note of irony – but that I can’t quite read.