You can't throw the rope of love to someone who hates ropes.
The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
Maxine Kumin’s poems about the specifics of life on the farm with family, and relationships to fish, fowl, horse and vegetable matter, not to mention lovely liquids and unappealing solids, are consistently satisfying and sometimes deliciously entertaining.
Carl Phillips is a masterful maker of sweet visual dances that are never cloying.
Laird’s steps are sure, his undermusic and undercurrents consistently strong. On Purpose is a slim volume that contains multitudes. 
A particular joy of Mysteriosos and Other Poems is the apprehension of current—biological, electric and historical, and in other forms– that distinguishes the most rigorously thrumming beats from their sallow imitators. 
Foreign aspects sometimes have a familiar whiff, and not just to Simic fans who have seen proof of his admission that Serbian poetry has affected his own. They have a familiar whiff because a number of poets in this collection have translated Whitman, T.
In A Meteorologist in the Promised Land, Becka Mara McKay reminds us that every language is a unique translation of a combination of desire and thought, both of which have complicated, individual histories.
Sherod Santos’s poems demonstrate profound, unwavering discipline, a restless ear, and a commitment to witness. He is serious but never pompous, substantial without being ponderous.
Kay Ryan has been compared to Emily Dickinson, and I like to imagine Dickinson and Marianne Moore reading her with sly commiseration. Unlike some poets with recognizable styles, Ryan does not write the same poem again and again, and her sharp eye is both benevolent and unflinching.
What Jelloun proves throughout this book is that he has not let language(s) fail him or the people, places and historical moments he memorializes, making dates that are not headlines as important as front page news.
A collection like Ohio Violence is best consumed in small doses, so that its imaginative density, which is never ponderous, can be absorbed.
The Next Settlement has a rock-solid American quality that compares favorably to William Carlos Williams. Think Plymouth and ocean waves constantly changing, hypnotic in part because of the mysteries beneath.
Marchant transforms potentially stale-sounding specifics into a breathing, universally grasped object as writer, reader and paradoxically, the “no longer beautiful mind” are in communion, even if the mind presented cannot comprehend the connection.
