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From Stephen Elliott
For people who don’t often read poetry (i.e. most people) it can take a significant life change to occasion the event; marriage, death, scary illness. I remember an old boyfriend’s mother kept a shelf of Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall in an otherwise poetry-spare home.
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Her poems were spare, fierce, dark little packages that managed to feel both mystical—almost like fairytales—and contemporary with their references to drugs and Greyhound stations.
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Lew Welch has been dead now for 40 years, just about as long as his total time on earth. He disappeared on May 23, 1971, walked out of poet and friend Gary Snyder’s house into the mountains of California, carrying a gun, and leaving behind a suicide note that read, “I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality.
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Madness, Rack, and Honey is a gift from a rigorous intellect, unflinching critic, and a big old sloppy heart. Ruefle has created a work of poetry from the daunting task of writing about it.
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The promised west in The Oregon Trail IS The Oregon Trail is an amalgam of bootstrap romance, wilderness bordered by suburban sprawl, death, and the ferocity of natural processes.
At its best, After the Point of No Return gives us just what we hope to find: poems that wrestle with mortality, retrace the steps of a life, and take us past the limit of flesh into whatever comes next.
Carl Adamshick is the author of Curses and Wishes, winner of the 2010 Walt Whitman Award, selected by Marvin Bell. He is a cofounder of Tavern Books. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, American Poet, and Narrative magazine.
Based in research of museum design, and memorialization, Slot’s narrator moves inside public landmarks dedicated to various disasters—9/11, slavery, Hiroshima, the Holocaust— and explores ways memorialization acts on conscience and memory, interrogating the urge to abstract, label, and catalogue suffering.