Romantic Poems by Mark Callanan

Drawing on Arthurian myth, the Romantic poets, the ill-fated “Great War” efforts of the Newfoundland Regiment, modern parenthood, 16-bit video games, and Major League Baseball, these poems examine the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, both as individuals and as communities, in order to explain how and why we are the way we are. At its heart, Romantic interrogates our western society’s idealized, self-deluding personal and cultural perspectives.

From Romantic:

Like the Green Knight, stooping
to retrieve his own severed melon
from the stone floor of a banquet
hall where it rolls past startled
courtiers to then catch against a
table leg and stop, I’m fumbling
for an errant thought; without his
flair for theatre, the practiced ease
with which he grips a hank of
hair and hoists his head aloft …