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Welcome back, poetry community. Today we're shining the spotlight on three poems by the talented Sean Wang. Please enjoy: Quarry Ledger, Salt-Stained Post, and Fuse Box Easter. Thank you, Sean, for sharing your work with SHINE international poetry series! Quarry Ledger Salt-Stained Post Fuse Box Easter  Sean Wang is a Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominated poet and PhD candidate. His poems appear or are forthcoming in West Trade Review, ONE ART, wildscape. literary journal, among others. He can be found on Instagram at @sean_wang1997.
Today, SHINE welcomes back UK-based poet Strider Marcus Jones, with three new poems: The Patterns, The Sun Drips Down, and This Now My Thoughts. It's a joy to read his work. Thanks, Strider, for sharing! The Patternssomewhere in everywhere everybody happens in the patterns, like flocks of rocks gathered to the lobby of Saturn's rings, graded and sorted into ugly and beautiful useful things; all something out of nothing but not absolute nothing: it seems matter that Mad Hatter and plectrums of light make tunes of self similarity settle and fight repeating this same existence without remembered resistance. The Sun Drips Downi don't feel like a stranger in your ease as i come to know your fast and slow above, below waves and seas roving like a ranger. a draft through the floor moves the closed to door, spills wax, wafts candlelight, and in music more slight behind words said becomes a squeezed breeze- that warms in and out where all love's doubt left and fled. as the shades of strings we shed, uncoil and leave our head, the sun drips down ultraviolet turning brown the sated flesh, whose oliveness soon condenses, freeing long suppressed senses to understand each other's expectation knowing love is more than our creation. This Now My Thoughtsthis now my thoughts open at the image of your name won't be revealing the secrets they explain- do you do the same on these out walks remembering the rain drop fractals on us feeling. back we go again, without preachers or bad teachers, harvest high with hope just us and frayed strands of poetry and bands on this bridge of notes our mind spans. in give we've got the bloom of this plot in garden to river shaping start and stop the melting clock of body quake then quiver through the Dreamtime day night and soul spirit lit by landscape light. we climb the Orange Rock to revert back far but have no Gaelic croft to live in who we are. it has changed hands until the purpose of these lands shoots dissenting music out of birds and sucks all truth from ancient words so existence is another language.  Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate, and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal; a member of The Poetry Society, nominated for the Pushcart Prize x4 and Best of the Net x3. His five published books of poetry (https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/) reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
Hello, poetry lovers and thanks for stopping by SHINE poetry series this Friday. It's an honor to shine the spotlight, today, on award-winning poet Paul Hostovsky, who hails from Massachusetts. Thank you, Paul, for bringing us "The Poetry Police," "Smelts," and, my favorite, "Negative Happiness." The Poetry PoliceThey had a warrant. I was suspected of lying, not only in the poems, but about the poems: I had said they were available when they weren’t. They knocked at the door: one bold rasp followed by two softer ones: a dactyl. I wondered, if I waited a little longer, what feet would the knuckles sing next? Four stressed loud knocks, as it turned out: two spondees. Insistent, official, unmistakably constabulary. I got up from my writing desk and peeped through the peephole: They didn’t look like readers of poetry. But then who’s to say, dear reader, what you look like anyway? You will want to know I never opened that door-- I returned to the poem, and deleted them penultimately, ultimately getting away with everything. SmeltsMy father loved smelts. My mother introduced him to my grandparents at a fancy seafood restaurant. My father ordered smelts. My grandfather said, “Smelts? No, try the lobster. Try the swordfish.” “He likes smelts,” said my mother. He’d been married twice before. His second divorce wasn’t final yet. He had two daughters. My grandparents weren’t happy about it. But they were cooperative. Especially my grandmother. “Let him have his smelts,” she said. And they let my mother marry him. Of course I didn’t know all this until she told me many years later, after my father died. That was when I tried smelts for the first time. I didn’t love them. But I love that my father loved them, that my mother loved my father, that my grandfather tried and failed to dissuade him from his smelts, tried and failed to dissuade her from my father. I love the story about the smelts but I can do without smelts. Negative HappinessI’m happy just to sit in this chair and breathe, and read a little about Arthur Schopenhauer who said life wasn’t worth living. No one could abide his pessimism, least of all his Mutti whose unconditional mother-love had only one condition: leave her alone. So he moved to Frankfurt and studied philosophy on her dime. People found him intolerable, and the feeling was mutual-- he spent long depressive periods in self-imposed isolation meditating on the nature of happiness, which he said was the breathing place between pain and suffering. And I’m thinking he was onto something there, sitting here in my chair, breathing happily ever since I got out of the hospital where I ended up because I couldn’t breathe. God, it feels so good just to sit here and breathe normally, and read about Arthur Schopenhauer who said we don’t know what we’ve got ‘til it’s gone, in so many words, in German.  Paul Hostovsky’s poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and Best of the Net. He has been published in Poetry, Passages North, Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry East, The Sun, and many other journals and anthologies. He has won a Pushcart Prize, the Comstock Review's Muriel Craft Bailey Award, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and chapbook contests from Grayson Books, Riverstone Press, Frank Cat Press, Split Oak Press, and Sport Literate. Paul has 14 full-length collections of poetry: Sonnets from South Mountain (2001), Bending the Notes (2008), Dear Truth (2009), A Little in Love a Lot (2011), Hurt Into Beauty (2012), Naming Names (2013), Selected Poems (2014), The Bad Guys (2015), Is That What That Is (2017), Late for the Gratitude Meeting (2019), Deaf & Blind (2020), Mostly (2021), Pitching for the Apostates (2023), and Perfect Disappearances (2025). He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. He lives with his wife Marlene in Medfield, Massachusetts.
This week, SHINE welcomes back Chicago-based writer Noah Berlatsky. Please enjoy two new poems: Poem Beginning With a Line By Vasko Popa, and Ain't No Mountain High Enough. Thank you, Noah, for sharing your work with the SHINE international poetry community! Poem Beginning With a Line By Vasko PopaOne is the nail, another is pliers. One is the ocean, another is a vast web of plastic. One is the pliers, another is rust. One hammers and hammers on the roof of a bat’s head. The bat is shrieking until all the rust flakes off. And at last there is no ocean, only the plastic breathing and breathing in its smooth and pulsing tides. The shark is caught in it. The shark with teeth like nails that are not really like nails, but built out of someone else’s petroleum, reflecting someone else’s colors. Pull them out of the wood. Steal them for yourself. Ain't No Mountain High Enough |
SHINE - International Poetry Series
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From the international poetry community, we have a "luxury of stars," as Sylvia Plath might say, and it is SHINE's honor to provide a home for their words with the online Spotlight series as well as SHINE Quarterly. Click on the logo above to learn more. And...keep writing, keep shining!
In poetry, Samantha Terrell, EIC SYLVIA PLATH
Stars Over the Dordogne Stars are dropping thick as stones into the twiggy
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