Deep Empathy and Dreamlike Transformation: On Gabriella R. Tallmadgeâs Sweet Beast
“. . . the speaker reckons with how to love and live in a marriage that is dissolving.”
All posts filed under: Book Reviews
Longform reviews of poetry books.
An Empire Elsewhere
Ceballos captures the violent reality oppressed and exploited people face due to U.S. involvement in their home countryâs economy and politics that force them to eventually leave. Through elegies, weâre made aware of the horrors they face after fleeing to the U.S.
Each Time You Enter Youâll Carry a Mouthful of Names
“Whereas Bilotserkivets speaks of the immediacy of survival,âwhat do I and You have to do in order to get beyond this current or recently passed stage of destruction and horrorâShuvalova picks up with the implicit question of how are you acting to remember that this is not something that just passes for everybody, that in order to read about these horrors they must be experienced by real, living countries.” -Cody Stetzel
Damaged and Open: On Sara Moore Wagner’s Hillbilly Madonna
“Struggle against the patriarchy is coupled with a critique of the faith that has made itself an organic part of Wagnerâs Appalachiaâas much a part of the region as its animals, trees, and plants.” -John McCarthy
Remember The Day I Discovered
“In her collection, Ben-Oni humanizes the study of physics, from stars to particles: how can we fit into a world we cannot see, does it matter if our reality is not as real as we once thought, and do our deep feelings of loss, joy, and grief mean anything when placed against infinite space?” Mark Spero on Rosebud Ben-Oni
A Guide to Disorientation: Dana Levinâs Now Do You Know Where You Are
. . . the collection is concerned with all kinds of disorientationâliteral, figurative, physical, and spiritualâand the despair that comes with navigating unknown terrains.
A Poet of the American Storm: On Landscape with Bloodfeud by Wendy Barnes
“To be vulnerable means also to know oneâs own capacity for harm . . .”âAmy Klein
Dreams of Cells and Wolves
Doubling as a spellbook, this collection performs speech acts that reach for healing and integration, all while meditating on which anti-inflammatories (aloe? spearmint? dates? wolves? breath? intimacy?) might best treat the global inflammation that is empire.
Dead Poets Love Us Back: On Polina Barskovaâs Air Raid
The voices to which Barskova has turned her obsessive, greedy, undeceived attention in Air Raid are not easy voices to listen to, but they are voices she is rescuing even as her poetry . . . is rescuing her, line by line.
A Braided Stream: On Keats Conley’s Guidance from the God of Seahorses
Conleyâs book, to adopt a phrase of her own making, functions like an âearworm for the Anthropocene.â