The most sustained thinking in the catalog. Where most of these poems arrive at a feeling, this one arrives at a position and then interrogates it, which is a different...
The most technically ambitious poem in the catalog. Running an injury log through a musical framework could easily have been a gimmick; it holds because the two systems keep finding...
Twenty-six lines and almost no waste. The cold-current line alone would carry the poem, and the never-forever couplet arrives four stanzas later to carry it again. Both work by contradiction...
A slight poem with one genuinely good idea in it. The reversal in the closing stanza retroactively rewrites the title, and that kind of structural payoff is worth more than...
Quiet and well made. The poem trusts its central image to carry the whole argument and never breaks to explain itself, which is discipline the catalog doesn’t always show. The...
A conceptual poem that works, which is rarer than it sounds. Presenting near-identical texts and asking the reader to find the difference is a device that fails whenever the differences...
Sincere and cleanly built, but it relies more on borrowed authority than on its own invention. Nineteen lines, and the two that stay with a reader are “I’m a testament”...
The best comic writing in this batch, and the comedy is structural rather than decorative. The poem sets up a genuine complaint, escalates it into an absurd engineering request, then...
Ambitious and largely successful. The poem’s method is collision: goddess against plumbing, Casablanca against the Dan Ryan, enchantment against an alarm clock. Where the collisions land, they land hard, and...
The title sets a standard the poem mostly meets. Its best writing is its least decorated: the heartbeat against the palm, the cat’s purr joining her rhythm, the umbrella and...
Twenty-six short lines that know exactly what they’re doing. The question-then-refusal opening is the best structural idea in this stretch of the catalog, and the poem is disciplined enough not...
The compression is what earns the score. “Caustic Revelation” said this at length and with more invention; this poem says it once and gets out, and the discipline gives the...
As a lyric it works, and it would work better sung than read. The AAB verses scan cleanly, the refrain is genuinely singable, and the closing reversal gives the song...
Restraint is what distinguishes this one. The catalog’s habit is accumulation, image layered on image until the feeling is unmistakable. Here David does the opposite: two memories, one observation about...
Compression is the achievement. Coming directly after the sprawling “Caustic Revelation,” this poem demonstrates that David can build an argument in twenty-four lines and stop the moment it lands. Nothing...
The most emotionally exposed piece in the catalog, and the least governed. Its imagery of corrosion is precise where it counts: the gum in the alley, the gym locker with...
One of the most biographically consequential poems in the recent catalog and the piece that names the catalog’s central question—will lightning strike again—most directly in months. The poem is the...
One of the most structurally ambitious composite pieces in the recent catalog and the second major multi-movement structure of April (following “Not Yet” from the day before). The piece operates...
One of the most structurally ambitious composite works in the recent catalog and the piece that delivers the catalog’s longest sustained somatic architecture in months. The four-movement Body-Eyes-Eyes-Heart progression is...
A nine-line meditation whose primary accomplishment is the compression of its three small structural claims—the love of two noons, the day’s pronounced worth, and the small victory of still writing—into...
One of the most precise small structural meditations in the recent catalog and the piece that delivers the catalog’s most systematic phenomenology of suffering in months. The four-stanza architecture—evident, shared,...
ACF CONTENT SUMMARY Date 05-19-26 Title Seed / I’m Just a Weed Topic A self-deprecating self-portrait in which the speaker positions himself as a weed facing Roundup—trembling at the impending...
A short hopeful invocation whose primary accomplishment is the eight-word “some-” stack at the opening and the closing temporal correction from “someday” to “tomorrow.” The piece operates in the catalog’s...
The "Taste of Honey" page features ratings of David's poems. The ratings are organized in batches from David's most recent poems at the front to his earliest submissions at the back. You can use the page number and date buttons below the boxed content to navigate. Recommended for use when browsing. You can also locate ratings for David's poems by visiting the Poetry Blog, selecting a poem and clicking on the "Ratings" tab. Recommended for use when reviewing specific poems.
