In award-winning Canadian poet Russell Thornton’s The Broken Face, he expertly intertwines themes of memory and place with the metaphysical and natural world, often through deeply personal portraits of his own family and experiences. In “Sirens” the speaker’s tiny son is excited by the sound of a fire truck blaring below their apartment window: “wild …
The Broken Face: A Review by Marvelyn Rowe Bucky Read More »
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 …
In this online post for the Poetry Society of America, Rick Barot reflects on one of the poems in his collection, The Galleons, noting how it is “ostensibly about one thing–the lilacs of spring” but how it also contains what he calls, “a strange cargo.” The poem in question is “The Names” and the strange …
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 »
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 …
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 …
Cyrus Cassells: A Chapbook of Border Crisis Poems Read More »
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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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 »
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, …
Book Review: Life in Suspension / La Vie Suspendue by Hélène Cardona Read More »