Book Reviews
Reviewed by:
Davy Knittle
If Jennifer Moxley is the speaker of the poems in her new collection The Open Secret (Flood Editions, 2014), she is a number of people. If she is “the poet” and also the “I” of the poems, and I, as the reader, am the “you,” because the “I” is also sometimes the “you,” we might be each other. Personhood is fluid, as she writes in “Evacuations... more
Reviewed by:
Phoebe Reeves
Best Bones, Sarah Rose Nordgren’s first book of poems, won the 2013 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was released from the University of Pittsburgh Press Pitt Poetry Series last year. Nordgren’s debut collection displays a Greek chorus of voices, ranging from the quiet tones of small children and ghosts to the sly or bitter tales of adults: wives, mistresses, slaves, and shepherds. “... more
Reviewed by:
Lisa Butts
Richard Siken's second collection, coming a decade after his Yale Younger Poets prize-winning debut Crush, finds the poet a subdued man with more mature preoccupations. The erotic energy and dazzling infatuation that drove Crush are replaced in War of the Foxes with frustrations about the impossibility of creating pure and true artistic representations. Siken sets this... more
Reviewed by:
Jack Smith
Watch Me Go establishes Mark Wisniewski as a writer who moves adeptly from the light to the dark, from the quirky, sometimes bizarre comic story to the eerie, unsettling thriller. His previous work—most notably Show Up, Look Good; Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman; and All Weekend with the Lights On—contains dark undercurrents suggestive of human frailty,... more
Reviewed by:
Alana Folsom
Dorothea Lasky's Rome begins with lines not from Ovid or Horace, but with Yeats: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / and fastened to a dying animal…”; and Lasky’s poems adhere, on a subject level, to this epigraph. But Rome is a book about language and voice more than its subject matter: the carnality of humanity when we’re reduced to raw emotion—especially love and loss... more
Pages
Reviewed by:
Julie Marie Wade
Denise Duhamel is one of my favorite poets and one of the most captivating, comforting, challenging writers I have ever read. But because she is “established” in the genre and I am only “emerging,” I realized with some chagrin as I was reading Blowout, her newest and best poetry collection to date, that I will never have a chance to blurb one of Duhamel’s books. We are poets of two generations. I belong to the one that comes after—and... more
Reviewed by:
Rebecca Morgan Frank
The opening section of Tanya Larkin’s debut collection, My Scarlet Ways, selected by judge Denise Duhamel for the 2011 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, sweeps us into the world of girls, but these are timeless, hell-raising girls with a kick and bite. The second poem could be read as an ars poetica of sorts: “Sisters, don’t let sisters / ride the chandelier. It’s just a Turkish tea set / with a drunken seductive chime / like the... more
Reviewed by:
Virginia Konchan
The landscape of Rusty Morrison's newest poetry collection, After Urgency, is one rid not only of music but the hope of its return.From “Verdancies of repetition”:Struck again and again, destiny might never chime.Toss consonants against the vowels for luck of true correspondence.Rhyme-fellows remain distinct even at a distance, like two wings frame the jay’s flight.Harbor the hidden accentual in the beautiful repose after vowelling.... more
Reviewed by:
Micah Bateman
“... And Lord the sound of their wings / is the sound of the leaves...”—Shane McCrae, from “Crows,” Mule THE WAY THINGS WORKis by admitting or opening away. This is the simplest form of current [...] The way things work is by solution, resistance lessened or increased and taken advantage of. The way things work is that finally we believe they are there, common and able to illustrate themselves. Wheel, kinetic flow, rising and falling... more
Reviewed by:
Rebecca van Laer
If you’ve read the back of a poetry book recently, you’ve probably learned that many contemporary poets are “reimagining the possibilities of lyric poetry,” “challenging the conventional boundaries of poetic form,” or otherwise transgressing and subverting the supposedly rigid limits of the lyric poem. This sort of rhetoric has been applied to prose poetry, to narrative poetry, and to professedly political poetry. The language of subversion has... more
