Jennifer Grotz’s new poems “The Fog” and “The Forest” are published in the current issue of NER, while the web site features audio recordings of Grotz reading these poems at The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. An excerpt from “The Forest”:

There was a little carpet of stream so clogged with leaves

it had stopped being a stream. And such a surfeit of silence,
it had become a kind of sound
to which, for a while, you could pay attention. Though
it’s inaccurate, I want to say it was like staring at a light.
All you could do was sense it; then you had to recover,
by which I mean to wait for everything to grow dim again.
Then the mind was the only flashlight, a little bobbing beam
that would illuminate randomly and too little.

(“The Forest,” read by the author, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, 2011)