Alex Tretbar @alex_tretbar Twitter profile

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

3 months

I won the @PENamerica Prison Writing Contest in 2022 and never received the $250 prize, even after much back and forth via email, which continues to this day. I know of at least one other first place winner who never received their prize money, either.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 months

"Colonizers write about flowers." — Noor Hindi

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

11 months

Ann Pedone, from THE ITALIAN PROFESSOR'S WIFE

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

9 months

Natalie Diaz

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

11 months

Books for the first semester of my MFA.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

3 months

Yet another example of how the organization often pays little more than lip service to the writers whose voices it claims to support.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

This one's for all the wandering souls I communed with on the streets of Portland. Many thanks to the editors at @poetrynw for publishing it in their latest issue.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

9 months

Places open for subs today: AGNI River Teeth The Kenyon Review The Cincinnati Review New England Review The Southern Review The Yale Review Bellevue Literary Review

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

10 months

I stole the title from Hamlet's mom, and the opening line is a bastardization of Proust. Thanks to @KaitlynAiry and Sébastian Butler for giving this a home in the latest issue of @meridianuva .

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

10 months

I’ve been out of prison for 365 days today. Thank you to my family and all the friends, mentors, colleagues, strangers, organizations, writers, editors, journals, musicians, and artists who have supported me this past year. And to those still imprisoned: I haven't forgotten you.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

"We didn't think everything could melt like this / But it did, and so quickly" @DorotheaLasky in the latest issue of @SoutheastReview

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

3 months

new poem in @colorado_review

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "...as he stood twenty years ago, / he stands now before Penelope." — Louise Glück, "Reunion"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

23 days

. @MosabAbuToha in the new @AGNIMagazine

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

8 months

"[Humankind's] self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure." —Walter Benjamin

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 month

I wrote an op-ed with @deutschbitte for @prismreports . @PENamerica 's Prison and Justice Writing program is failing the incarcerated writers it claims to support. We are calling for a top-down restructuring of the organization.

Why isn’t PEN America paying its incarcerated prize winners?

Recent winners of PEN America’s Prison Writing Awards are missing a total of $925 in payments—a small fortune in prison

prismreports.org

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ The viscerality of new motherhood, through the eyes of the great Sharon Olds. "she drew the avalanche of milk / down off the mountain..."

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

3 months

new poem in @phoebejournal thanks to @icooper435 for help with the last line's phrasing

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ "In the train that we call life / We are all chance events in one another's lives, / And we all feel sorry when it's time to get off." —Álvaro de Campos (a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa), translated by Richard Zenith

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ A mind-bending classic. "Perhaps there is a moon shining / From somewhere, as though behind a hill—" Charles Simic, "Stone"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

I have two little poems up at @OneArtPoetry1 today. Here's one of them. Thank you to @MarkDanowsky and @eboninthehedges for featuring my work.

ONE ART

@OneArtPoetry1

1 year

Two Poems by Alex Tretbar

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

3 months

I have three poems up at @PoetryCurrency . This one is for Elise.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

10 months

My manuscript KANSAS CITY GOTHIC, a crown of 33 compressed sonnets, was selected as a finalist for the Wolfson Press Chapbook Contest. Congratulations to Triin Paja for winning. Below is an excerpt from my manuscript ( @OSRJournal will be publishing 4 of the sonnets next year).

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

I wrote this poem in a prison workshop this time last year, with the help of @icooper435 , Laura Winberry, Mike Cooper, and my fellow incarcerated. @SoutheastReview just published it. Thanks so much to @thebretthanley and company for selecting it. Baskets of gratitude all around.

Southeast Review

@SoutheastReview

1 year

Welcome to Vol. 41.1! We invite you to dive into these gorgeous works of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art. Each of them took our breath away! This is a phenomenal issue, and we can’t wait for you to discover each incredible facet of it! 💚💚

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "The mad reversals: fawns are carnivores, / coyotes whine for edible flowers. Each morning / glory a tsunami siren." — @dlseuss , of course, from "frank: sonnets"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ I instantly thought of this one by Nicky Beer @nbeerpoet . I'd quote the staggering final lines, but that would ruin it.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "To be a country of trafficless roads / & a sports car for my aunt, who likes to go / fast." — @chenchenwrites , “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities”

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ A Max Ritvo poem that is very dear to me. Ritvo was a poet of both the body and the spirit. "—my body lights up for life / like all the wishes being granted in a fountain / at the same instant—"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

I have a mischievous little will-o'-the-wisp over at @havehadhavehad today. Thanks to @Aaron__Burch and @crowjonah for selecting it. 💀💀

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

3 months

@that_Adriana_H @JeremyTiang @PENamerica One of my contacts there, someone who has put in a great deal of work trying to resolve the issue over the past 1.5 years, reached out to me this afternoon and is trying once more to figure it out. I appreciate the offer, though.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "Each has lost a son." — Robert Bly

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 month

first poem from @FadyJoudah 's ALIGHT

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ "Like ivy behind a chimney / it grows and grows in ropes." —John Ashbery, "On His Reluctance to Take Down the Christmas Ornaments"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

8 months

Teaching a class on prose poems in this room tomorrow at the @KCLibrary downtown branch, as part of the Heartland Book Festival. We're gonna look at poems by @JoseHernandezDz , @no1_emily , Lu Xun, Rabindranath Tagore, and Rimbaud. Sonnets next month at the Plaza branch!

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

11 months

I've been thrice skulled: got two email poems over at @havehadhavehad today. Hope they find you well 💀💀💀

HAD

@havehadhavehad

11 months

2 new @alex_tretbar poems for y'all today!! "Did you stumble into my mouth, or did my mouth stumble into a shattered sentence fragment with you as its object?"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

8 months

Diana Marie Delgado, in @AGNIMagazine

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 month

Exhaustive reporting by @bytamarsarai for @prismreports on the various ways @PENamerica is failing the incarcerated writers it claims to support. Most of the prize winners that @deutschbitte contacted still have not been paid.

PEN America is a lifeline and ‘wasted opportunity’ for some incarcerated writers

PEN’s decades-old prison programming lacks the organization and infrastructure to effectively communicate with and pay incarcerated writers

prismreports.org

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ @Danez_Smif @GraywolfPress "...the light that makes / leaf-shadows tremble on the wall / is an invitation, a way of going back / to the kingdom of the living..." —William Brewer, "The Good News"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "I have only to wait & all things come to me / and therein break their necks" — "The Spiders," translated from the Osage language by the author, Chelsea T. Hicks

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ "Here is the clavicle-snapped wish..." —Brian Turner, "Here, Bullet"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

10 months

Agadora doesn't have a @havehadhavehad skull, but she does have a skull, and it's a bit small for her HADT.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

10 months

"Each night / Is trifoliate, strange to the touch." —Ashbery, "The Wrong Kind of Insurance"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "The bright, violet blob // I called God / would forgive the atrocities // roared in ethanol rage..." By @EugeniaLeigh , in @WaxwingMag . The title of the poem is "What I Miss Most About Hell," which feeds into the first line: "is prayer."

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ A poem of mine, "Among the Cattails," published last month in @JournalSnarl .

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "Childhood is a string tied / To a great, remarkable nothing." — Baron Wormser, "Some Happiness"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ An epithalamial stunner by Jane Hirshfield. "Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly / Spoken and silent..."

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ "First you might cry. / Because shame and loneliness are almost one." —Fanny Howe, excerpt from "Loneliness" ()

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so." — John Berryman, "Dream Song 14"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

I have two poems in the new issue of @Heroin_Chic_Mag . Big thanks to James Diaz for giving them a home.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "If there is a world where we feel very little, / let it not be our world." — Joanna Klink, "Processional"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

10 months

from CAGE OF LIT GLASS, by @charles_kell

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "Even now this landscape is assembling." —the obligatory Louise Glück, "All Hallows"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

9 months

from BRUTE by Emily Skaja

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ @adalimon @Milkweed_Books "I promise. I surrender. I'm sorry." —Ben Lerner

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "I saw things darkly, / as through an unwashed goldfish globe." — Robert Lowell, "Eye and Tooth"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ "No people killed—or were killed—on this ground / hallowed by neglect and an air so tame / that people celebrate it by forgetting its name." —William Stafford, "At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

This poem is an amalgamation of stories, both my own and those of others I met or imagined—in Los Angeles, Portland, jails, and prisons. Thanks to @_johnnycordova and @domkeykong for giving it space in the revival issue of @sho_journal . It was a pleasure working with them.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

I have a poem in the latest issue of @CutbowQ . Thanks to @HunterArden for selecting it, and for making it look so pretty on the page. It's an honor to be published alongside so many great hybrid works.

Cutbow Quarterly - Long term hiatus

@CutbowQ

1 year

ISSUE THREE IS HERE! Thank you so much to all our contributors and to the team @beelzebadger and @arsalandy !

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

Just received the new @BatCityReview , which has my story about boyhood, fatherhood, memory, addiction, prison, and a Sunday spent in the Commodore Hotel in downtown Wichita. I'm endlessly grateful to @sophoulas and company for so expertly drawing out the essence of this piece.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ Thanks for sharing. Here's some more Galway Kinnell, on the wildness of babies, from "Under the Maud-Moon." "...her hair / sprouting out, / her gums budding for her first spring on earth..."

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ "When I stand upright in the wind, / My bones turn to dark emeralds." —James Wright, "The Jewel"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

Had a prose poem accepted by @SouthernHReview last week. Big thanks to @JoseHernandezDz for his generative surreal prose poetry workshop offered through @adkctr4writing .

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ @GraywolfPress "...in the house of money / in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money..." — @ilya_poet , "We Lived Happily During the War"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

8 months

A little poem I wrote during the first year of the pandemic, just published in Coal City Review, Brian Daldorph's baby out of Lawrence.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ @PushcartPrize The opening stanza of Audre Lorde's "Power."

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

Been waiting on this one for a while. @mbrrray 's GOOD GRIEF, THE GROUND finally showed up at my door.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

3 months

Last week I was randomly released from post-prison supervision (parole) 16 months early. Apparently a new law was passed with little fanfare: OAR 291-209-0045. If you or a loved one is on parole in Oregon, take a look at the law to determine eligibility:

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ @stars_poem A seemingly lighthearted ode to "Topshe Fish with Eggs," but there's a devastating line at its core. By Ishwar Gupta, translated from the Bengali by Rosinka Chaudhuri & Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman, / Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing, // I and the other women this exceptional / act with the exceptional heroic body, / this giving birth, this glistening verb..." —Sharon Olds, “The Language of the Brag”

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

7 months

Grief will probably redraft your whole anatomy: —Carolina Ebeid

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

Beautiful artwork for the forthcoming revival issue of Shō, and I'm honored to have a poem in it.

Shō Poetry Journal

@sho_journal

1 year

Cover reveal for our revival issue. It went out to the printer today! Options to subscribe and/or purchase will be posted to our website soon. #WritingCommnunity #poetrytwitter

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

10 months

John Yau, from the remarkable anthology THE OPEN BOAT (ed. Garrett Hongo)

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ "Why do I tell you these things? / You are not even here." — John Ashbery, "This Room"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

7 months

Israel is committing genocide. Please oppose it in whatever ways you can.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "...it’s the moths’ eyes that haunt me, their wings / teaching the secret of flight, opening and closing / like the leaves of a sacred book..." — Richard Lambert, "The Secret of Flight"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude..." — Rilke, "Letters to a Young Poet"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

I have a couple of wintry micropoems in the latest Pebbles issue of @petrichorjourn . Thanks to the editors for including them!

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

My poem inspired by John Ashbery's collage "Poisson D'Avril" (see below) was just published by @CobraMag . Thanks to @erinmizrahi , @Alonso99 , @arealtravistea , and @KalynRoseAnne for kindly housing my little April fish.

Cobra Milk

@CobraMag

1 year

⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️Issue 04 is live!!!!⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ "My actual childhood / was a sapling / in the forest of years..." —Linda Pastan, "The Collected Poems"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "Therefore, regret nothing: The roses of life, we'll have gathered a lot of them even so." a prose poem by Serge Fauchereau

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

9 months

Trying to read Kant but he just makes me want to write poems about flowers.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

11 months

James Croal Jackson ( @Jimjakk ) in @SANDJournal .

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ "It has brought its flute it is a long way" "Dusk in Winter," by W.S. Merwin (I suspect Merwin will make more than one appearance today.)

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

9 months

This is unacceptable. Books from the outside world are one of the few lifelines left to people who live in prison.

Missouri Prison Reform

@moprisonreform

9 months

Per the @MoCorrections newsletter, family and friends are no longer allowed to send books to prison residents citing drugs and other contraband. What’s being done about staff bringing in drugs? @AnnePrecythe ? Just taking away more from residents while ignoring the main problem.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

5 months

"But now there is no car, no restaurants, no ice cream shops, no strawberry farms, no Refaat." from "Palestine Is a Story Away: A Tribute to Refaat Alareer" by @MosabAbuToha in @LAReviewofBooks

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

9 months

Cover of April 1943 issue of Bourne, a magazine published monthly by inmates at Indiana State Prison. Sourced from the American Prison Newspapers collection (via JSTOR), which houses 12,000+ items from the 1800s to the present.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ "And ash, as if the hills hid a fire / That somewhere else consumed a universe." —Yves Bonnefoy, translated from the French by Paul Weinfield There are multiple parts to this beautiful and strange poem. I recommend reading them all in his book "The Curved Planks."

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

9 months

from Jackson Holbert's WINTER STRANGER

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 months

Please sign this petition to release incarcerated journalist Kwaneta Harris from a Texas prison's solitary confinement unit, where she has been held for the past 8 years.

993 people signed and won this petition

Release Incarcerated Journalist Kwaneta Harris from Solitary Confinement

www.change.org

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

@Joseph_Fasano_ "You'd think / the sun had gotten lost inside his head, / the way he smiled." A complicated wonder. —William Brewer, from I KNOW YOUR KIND

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

8 months

RIP Louise Glück

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

@Joseph_Fasano_ "The dwarf maple caught my attention / in an ominous way..." — @janaprikryl , "Ontario Gothic"

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

Thanks to the editors at @TIReview for publishing three of my poems today. Here's one of them, "Slake." The rest can be found at

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

My lysergic lyric with cameos by Richard Hell and Baudelaire is up over at @havehadhavehad today. Thanks to @blisster for the💀

Fluff by Alex Tretbar

I’m yours and you’re mine and that’s all I know right now howls Richard Hell as I wake to the pixelated ceiling and my flatmates tell me I ate all the acid amid my blackout, clawing drunk through the...

www.havehashad.com

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 months

@mooninabucket @PENamerica It isn't.

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

"Ever since the wall that cut their brains in two / came down, they've said little..." Steven Cramer in @OSRJournal

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

I wrote a nonfiction piece about memory, boyhood, prison, addiction, and the day Dale Earnhardt died, and @BatCityReview published it. I'm honored to be included alongside such great company.

Bat City Review

@BatCityReview

1 year

BCR ISSUE 19 is here! Featuring 201 pages of gorgeous fiction, poetry, non-fiction, hybrid work, a folio of new Tomaž Šalamun translations by Brian Henry, and visual art. We can’t wait for you to meet it ✨

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 months

Disappointing, incomprehensible, and clearly cobbled together in haste and desperation. This organization needs a top-down restructuring. It is failing to fulfill its mission.

PEN America

@PENamerica

2 months

Ahead of the 2024 #PENWorldVoices Festival, nine former PEN America presidents came together to stress the importance of the organization’s role in maintaining open dialogue within the writing community, especially at a time of divisive conflict:

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

1 year

Some memorable one-sentence lines (from A LITTLE BOOK ON FORM by Robert Hass)

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Alex Tretbar

@alex_tretbar

2 years

My poem "Vertigo" was published over at @inksounds1 yesterday. I'm honored to be featured alongside such talented writers. Thank you to @danielliu_1 for giving my poem a home, and to @icooper435 for her generative workshops and editorial acumen.

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