book review

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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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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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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Book Review: Barbie Chang by Victoria Chang

Barbie Chang by Victoria Chang Copper Canyon Press, 2017 IBSN: 9780688156978 $16 Reviewed by J. G. McClure Barbie Chang, Victoria Chang’s fourth collection, makes use of a voice American Poet has aptly called “equal parts searing, vulnerable, and terrified.” The eponymous character is somewhat reminiscent of John Berryman’s Henry—that darkly, often hilariously self-excoriating voice, that dizzily off-kilter way

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Book Review: Lonesome Gnosis by Elizabeth Scanlon

Lonesome Gnosis by Elizabeth Scanlon Horsethief Books, 2017, $24 ISBN:978-0998246307 Reviewed by Matthew Girolami   Elizabeth Scanlon’s debut collection of poetry, Lonesome Gnosis, begins in Sanskrit: “They chant Kali durga namo nama because, I said, / some things just sound better in Sanskrit.” What follows (“it’s not about you get over it”) is an English permutation of

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Book Review: The Silence that Remains by Ghassan Zaqtan

The Silence that Remains by Ghassan Zaqtan (trans. Fady Joudah) Copper Canyon Press, 2017 ISBN-13: 978-1556595141 Reviewed by J.G. McClure Ghassan Zaqtan’s volume of selected poems, The Silence That Remains, is aptly named. Throughout the collection (translated from the Arabic and with a foreword by Fady Joudah), we see a poet skilled in creating evocative, impressionistic

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Book Review: Hallowed: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Fargnoli

Hallowed: New and Selected Poems By Patricia Fargnoli Tupelo Press, September 2017 ISBN-13: 978-1946482006 Reviewed by Z.G. Tomaszewski Reaching Toward What Shining We Are   The poems in Patricia Fargnoli’s Hallowed: New and Selected Poems (Tupelo Press, 2017) “wish to go somewhere deeper,” to that place of ultimate quiet in which anything can be remembered,

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Book Review: Cooking with the Muse by Myra Kornfeld and Stephen Massimilla

Cooking with the Muse by Myra Kornfeld and Stephen Massimilla 500 pages Tupelo Press, 2016, $39.95 ISBN: 978-1-936797-68-4 Reviewed by Annelies Zijderveld To fall for a ripe plum is to plunge your teeth into a juicy poem, ripened for the reader. Poet Stephen Massimilla and cookbook author Myra Kornfeld explore the intersections of food and poetry

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