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 …
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, …
Review of Shahr-e-Jaannaan: The City of the Beloved by Adeeba Shahid Talukder Read More »
“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 …
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 …
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 …
Primal Civilisation- On Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s Doe Songs: Vladimir Lucien Read More »
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 …
What kind of music / can you put a hole through’: Rachel Galvin’s Civilian Poetic Read More »
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 …
Beyond Time and Place: A Review of Where the Light is Violet by Xánath Caraza Read More »
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 …
Travis Denton’s My Stunt Double: Review by J.G. McClure Read More »
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 …
Book Review of The Fire Lit & Nearing by Leonard Kress Read More »
