Longform reviews of poetry books.
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.
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.
Conley’s book, to adopt a phrase of her own making, functions like an “earworm for the Anthropocene.”
Rebecca Morgan Frank’s Oh You Robot Saints!, reviewed by J. Ahana-Laba
Muriel Leung’s Imagine Us, the Swarm
“Speaking these poems out loud, you will hear the sounds that Simmonds was able to put on the page, the way songs move with their own time, and how they push our bodies to inhabit that time.” — Mark Spero
“Olzmann writes with a penchant for allegory and ethical dilemmas, but these poems avoid parable or pat answers.” —Risa Denenberg
“The loneliness that drenches Burying the Mountain derives from rejection and alienation, but also from portent.” —Angelo Mao
“The body and the land mirror each other in their growth and development, in their ability to be beautifully reset and be born from last year’s ‘undue shrubbery.'” – Cass Garison
“H of H Playbook is a submission to our collective conscience, a treatise against empire, and a reminder that there is no myth nor story that can replace actual, material human experience.” – Dujie Tahat
