Reviews

Mistress: A Review by Maya Carter

Chet’la Sebree, in her premier collection, Mistress, offers an astonishing parallel between the 19th and 21st-century woman and the challenges of navigating Black womanhood at the intersection of men, sexuality, and self-actualization. She creates a speaker born of the innermost thoughts of both Sally Hemings, the slave and alleged mistress of Thomas Jefferson, and herself …

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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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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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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 …

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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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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 …

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“Between Risk and Refuge”: on Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, translated by Luke Hankins

“Between Risk and Refuge”: a review of A Cry in the Snow and other poemsby Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, translated by Luke Hankins   by José Angel Araguz   Reading Stella Vinitchi Radulescu’s poems originally written in French translated into English drives home the dual privilege and responsibility that comes with the work of translation. In …

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Book Review: Life in Suspension / La Vie Suspendue by Hélène Cardona

Life in Suspension / La Vie Suspendue by Hélène Cardona Salmon Press, 2016 Reviewed by Alison Williams     If a purpose of poetry is to transcend, then Hélène Cardona’s poems in her new book Life in Suspension / La Vie Suspendue reflect a linguistic spiritual transcendence that is illuminated on every page.  It is a transcendence, …

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Book Review: xamissa by Henk Rossouw

xamissa by Henk Rossouw Fordham University Press Reviewed by Keenan Colditz “In the city      begin and begin again sleep’s graffiti” —Henk Rossouw xamissa, by Henk Rossouw, is a book length poem and the winner of the 2017 Poets Out Loud Editor’s prize. In this historically rich text, Rossouw  de-centers the reader by placing them in …

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