Deep Empathy and Dreamlike Transformation: On Gabriella R. Tallmadge’s Sweet Beast
“. . . the speaker reckons with how to love and live in a marriage that is dissolving.”
“. . . the speaker reckons with how to love and live in a marriage that is dissolving.”
“When a black woman poet refuses punctuation, she is refusing more than standard English. She is also refusing to allow the marks of history to (over)determine her writing.”
“Whereas Bilotserkivets speaks of the immediacy of survival,–what do I and You have to do in order to get beyond this current or recently passed stage of destruction and horror–Shuvalova 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
. . . the collection is concerned with all kinds of disorientation–literal, figurative, physical, and spiritual–and the despair that comes with navigating unknown terrains.
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.
On Angela Narciso Torres’s What Happens is Neither
by Jake Uitti | Contributing Writer
We used to sing, / facing the flag like it could hear us.
like wary caterpillars, / through the Good Thing Gallery