Strange Cargo
The Galleons by Rick Barot | Reviewed by Paula Stacey
Summer Snow: A Review by Grace Li
Summer Snow is a rich and substantial new collection from the acclaimed poet Robert Hass. As the former Poet Laureate’s first new collection in ten years, and the length and breadth of the book suggest careful, years-long work. At age 79, Hass’s latest work is often elegiac in some form or another, for people or
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What Does Not Return
In language as simple and expansive as the prairie | review by Anna Alarcon
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Review of Shahr-e-Jaannaan: The City of the Beloved by Adeeba Shahid Talukder
One should never judge a book by its cover, they say, but one look at the sumptuous cover and lovely Urdu title of Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s Kundiman Prize-winning poetry collection and you feel something extraordinary is contained therein. The cover picture is a lavishly detailed historical painting of a wedding, full of people in attendance,
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Two New Poems by Jeffrey Levine
À Propos Ravens The Flying Raven, Édouard Manet, Ex Libris for The Raven (Le Corbeau) by Edgar Allan Poe, French Edition, Trans. Stéphane Mallarmé, (1875) You take the folding chair outdoors facing the ocean. Pencils. The book. The papers. There will be further postponements. The calling and quothing of ravens makes it impossible to hear
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A Conversation with Dawn Lundy Martin by D.S. Waldman
“The poem, for me, is an embodied entity. It emerges from the body in the first place and, in the space of the reading or the performance, it returns to the body–“
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The Unsubordinated Self: a Review of Dana Roeser’s “All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts”
“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” wrote the poet Richard Wilbur, paraphrasing St. Augustine’s Confessions, Book X. In a revision of Wilbur and Augustine, the speaker in Dana Roeser’s fourth poetry collection confesses: “Clutter keeps / me bound to this / earth.” The things of this world—the clutter of our living—is an
Native Voices: A Matter of Visibility
The literary canon hasn’t changed all that much, is what I hear from several teachers. They say it with a dismissive tone and an impatience for contemporary work. The fact that there are instructors and professors who teach with this mindset is a sad reality, especially when their occupation bears the responsibility of introducing literary
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Interview with CMarie Fuhrman and Dean Rader: Gatekeeping: Who Gets to be Heard & Read?
This deeply meditative interview with CMarie Fuhrman and Dean Rader, editors of the 2019 collection, Native Voices, raises essential questions about the literary canon. Who gets to decide visibility? Who gets the platform to give voice to experience? What bodies are fortunate enough to be consumed by poetry? Or in Hari Alluri’s words, “Whose bodies are consumed by poetry?
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In Conversation with Brazilian Poet Angélica Freitas
Angélica Freitas is an acclaimed Brazilian writer whose poetry addresses topics of feminism and LGBTQ issues, in dialogue with poetics of the past. Her second collection of poetry, Um Útero É do Tamanho de Um Punho (A Womb is the Size of a Fist) recently became the subject of an attempted censorship in the state
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“Self-Reflection”: a poem by Leah Umansky
Self-Reflection Apparently, St. Margaret was so pious that she was indigestible when the dragon tried to swallow her. The dragon didn’t want her, was repelled by her, and saw her as alien. She was both easy to resist, yet also irresistible. It often feels like I am of the same flock. I repel; I reject;
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Cyrus Cassells: A Chapbook of Border Crisis Poems
ICEBOX 1. To The Gladiator in the Rogue Arena Gladiator, whose steely prowess is in service To a rogue arena, A sullying Caesar, With-us-or-against-us strongman, Confess: are they daunting beasts In those borderland cages, or children? Children! Then go and rescue them from the ruffian world! 2. Those “RETURN TO SENDERS” Children Separated, the
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Primal Civilisation- On Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s Doe Songs: Vladimir Lucien
Primal Civilisation– On Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s Doe Songs by Vladimir Lucien I first came across Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s work during undergrad in a slim volume published by University of the West Indies (St. Augustine). The work gathered there had been some of the best work coming out of a creative writing course that the Department of Literatures
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What kind of music / can you put a hole through’: Rachel Galvin’s Civilian Poetic
A review of Rachel Galvin’s Elevated Threat Level. Green Lantern Press, 2018. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rachel Galvin argues, “Poetry, like journalism, is a first draft of history.” In her second book of poems, Elevated Threat Level, published in a slim, elegant edition by Green Lantern Press in
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Beyond Time and Place: A Review of Where the Light is Violet by Xánath Caraza
Beyond Time and Place: A Review of Where the Light is Violet by Xánath Caraza reviewed by Arthur Kayazakian I was supposed to write this book review a year and a half ago. The reminder sat in the back of my head, haunting me the whole year. Something inside me stirred violently; I was worried
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Travis Denton’s My Stunt Double: Review by J.G. McClure
My Stunt Double, by Travis Denton reviewed by J.G. McClure Travis Denton’s latest poetry collection, My Stunt Double (C&R Press 2018) shows a poet grappling with what beauty might mean in our science fictional age. The collection’s opening poem, “What Beauty Gives Us,” begins: When I look up at the red dot in the sky Grazing
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Book Review of The Fire Lit & Nearing by Leonard Kress
The Fire Lit & Nearing by J.G. McClure. Brooklyn, New York: Indolent Books May 2018. 78 pages. $14.99, paper. Whenever I encounter a new volume of poetry, I open the book and read the first randomly chosen line my finger falls upon. I do this as an act of divination, though I’m not concerned
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The Art of Disorder in Heidi Seaborn’s Give a Girl Chaos (see what she can do) by Michelle Bitting
The Art of Disorder in Heidi Seaborn’s Give a Girl Chaos (see what she can do) by Michelle Bitting January 28, 2019 One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star… For someone who holds near and dear Nietzsche’s famous adage on chaos and its role as an integral force
3 Poems from Brandon Courtney
from KEEL II. The past survives inside my mind: somehow they are still alive: all their bodies side-by-side surface, blister sea to breathe azure. Above, below, above their eyes sunk below the gulf, labia sunrise knives, refracts and yaws, which warps the tongue-reed and water-mouthed. Salt and dulse drapes like hoarfrost from their ghosts. Crowned
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LETTER FROM PARIS in March, 2019 from MARGO BERDESHEVSKY
LETTER FROM PARIS in March, 2019 from MARGO BERDESHEVSKY Untitled The man is quickened to memory a star risen to where none may touch but his poems and this iota of the last time I visited amid the dim corners the bend of fronds his ever caretakers the surround of palms and on a crowded
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