abu ghraib arias by Phil Metres
Virginia Konchan reviews Phil Metres’ abu ghraib arias today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Posts Tagged: reviews
Bright Wings An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds edited by Billy Collins
Barbara Berman reviews Bright Wings An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds edited by Billy Collins today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Theophobia by Bruce Beasley
Julie Marie Wade reviews Bruce Beasley’s Theophobia today in Rumpus Poetry.
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This is Not About Birds by Nick Ripatrazone
Kristina Marie Darling reviews Nick Ripatrazone’s This is Not About Birds today in Rumpus Poetry.
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City of Rivers by Zubair Ahmed
Tory Adkisson reviews Zubair Ahmed’s City of Rivers today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Looking For the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
Julie Marie Wade reviews Richard Blanco’s Looking For the Gulf Motel today in Rumpus Poetry.
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It Becomes You by Dobby Gibson
Jeff Alessandrelli reviews Dobby Gibson’s It Becomes You today in Rumpus Poetry.
...more“Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story”
Vaguely reminiscent of our very own Letters in the Mail, Michael Kimball’s new book, Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard) reinvents memoir in a way that would have Montaigne going postal.
In his review, Joseph Riipi shares some of the itemized moments captured in Kimball’s collection, from facts that are clerical (“According to postcard #267, “Michael Kimball was born two weeks late.”), and facts that are humorous (“In third grade, Matt Bell #129 won a certificate for writing the best pirate story set in outer space.”), to facts that are heartbreaking.
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Animal Eye by Paisley Rekdal
Trista Edwards reviews Paisley Rekdal’s Animal Eye today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Thank You For the Window Office by Maged Zaher
Gina Myers reviews Maged Zaher’s Thank You For the Window Office today in Rumpus Books.
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The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault
At their best, love and translation share some contradictions, including selfishness and generosity. Translation is impossible, or at least not very good, without a passionate desire to own the material and leave one’s mark on it. At the same time, few translators want to “hide the light” of their translations “under a bushel.” The translations they undertake and complete belong to them, are marked by them, and yet they are without much value unless shared.
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The Moon and Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph Cornell by Kristina Marie Darling
The Moon & Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph Cornell is a fully enchanting if somewhat mysterious collection of poems, written entirely as footnotes, by the prolific Kristina Marie Darling. Although the book’s subtitle suggests Cornell as its primary subject matter, these poems are inspired by Cornell’s use of assemblage rather than derived from or driven by it.
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Fair Copy by Rebecca Hazelton
The subjects in Rebecca Hazelton’s debut collection, Fair Copy, are unmistakably specimens: alien creatures teeming under glass—animated, cellular, breathing. This isn’t surprising when you consider each poem was born from the first line of every twenty-ninth poem in Emily Dickinson’s Complete Works, a conceit born out of the poet’s kinship with the number (she was twenty-nine when she first composed these poems) and the poet.
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New Shoes on a Dead Horse by Sierra DeMulder
Winning just about every national poetry slam competition there is, Sierra DeMulder’s words and poetic swagger have won untouchable real estate in my bookshelf. DeMulder’s newest book, New Shoes on a Dead Horse re-defines confessional poetry; in fact, it pushes it aside and claims there is more to each and every picture.
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The Word on the Street by Paul Muldoon
The Word on the Street is not Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon’s first work of writing for music. He wrote librettos for four Daren Hagen operas; Shining Bow, Vera of Las Vegas, Bandanna, and The Ancient Concert and worked in rock ‘n’ roll, writing for The Handsome Family, collaborating with Warren Zevon, and playing in and writing for two other bands; Rackett and The Wayside Shrines.
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Sightseer by Cynthia Marie Hoffman
Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s excellent debut poetry collection, Sightseer, is part travelogue, part epistle, and part reclamation of the very idea of tourism. The winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, Sightseer briskly circles the globe, from Provincetown to Russia to Ireland to Poland, in poems that address the various onion-domed cathedrals, seventh-century castles, and oyster-laden beaches that the speaker encounters along the way.
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Hider Roser by Ben Mirov
The experience of reading Ben Mirov’s new book of poetry,Hider Roser, is like what the experience of being alone inside of someone else’s head might be like: it’s a place where one encounters fragments of dreams, splintered selves, and half-thoughts, along with books, authors, memories, and other detritus that makes up a life.
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Reluctant Mistress by Anne Champion
Anne Champion’s dazzling first book of poetry, Reluctant Mistress, offers readers a thought-provoking revision of the love lyric, rendering this rich literary tradition relevant to a postmodern cultural landscape. While invoking couplets, tercets, and other vestiges of her artistic heritage, Champion’s poems interrogate the power relations implicit in traditional love poetry, redefining their terms with subtlety and grace.
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Things I Say to Pirates on Nights When I Miss You by Keely Hyslop
Pirates plunder. Pirates navigate by wit and savvy and force. They intercept us somewhere between where we were and where we think we are going to end up. They are the enemies of intention. Where we might ask, Where is life taking me?
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Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva
Dark Elderberry Branch is a collaboration between two living poets and one who is dead but fully present. Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa (former Soviet Union, in the Ukraine), learning English at the age of 16 when his family immigrated to the United States.
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Messages by Piotr Gwiazda
When I was young and soft and I couldn’t fall asleep at night, I’d just lie there in bed, swallowing lumps of dread whose shape and taste I had no way of understanding. To stop my mind from its looping grind, I’d count as high as I could before the numbers lost their meaning, morphing into endless strings of code.
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Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck
Every prison sentence represents compound tragedies involving family members and friends, the affect on the community where the crime was committed, and, of course, the prisoner whose sentence may or may not be appropriate. If the prisoner who is confined is innocent, outrage enters the mix.
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Notturno by Gabriele D’Annunzio
Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote Notturno on strips of paper big enough for just one line a piece, while his eyes were bandaged into near blindness, as he convalesced for over two months from an eye injury. As Virginia Jewiss writes in the preface, “…Notturno offers one of the most extraordinary stories of literary creation ever conceived.” I prefer to first experience a work in a kind of vacuum, with as little knowledge of the author’s life and context of composition as possible.
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Butch Geography by Stacey Waite
Of all the stunning epigraphs Stacey Waite includes in Butch Geography—insights from William Carlos Williams and Judith Butler and Virginia Woolf—the most memorable and significant to me is the Japanese proverb which marks the second of the book’s four sections: The reverse side also has a reverse side.
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Murder Ballad by Jane Springer
Because a book of poetry can do anything, I am going to propose that Jane Springer’s Murder Ballad open a hole in the Mississippi River. An impossible hole. Because the poems are going to vacate and fill in the space that was left in the Mississippi at once.
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Orphan Hours by Stanley Plumly
Like a blue jay, thrush, or white-chested robin, darting in last light into leaves, twigs, or sky – after the rain, say, but before evening falls, when dark follows a darkening, Stanley Plumly’s Orphan Hours shows us moments rife with a startling beauty, terrible with longing.
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Dialogos: Paired Poems in Translation by George Kalogeris
I
Scene: The hilltop retreat of the ascetic Skepticus, high above the City. Small, uneven open space amid rocks, center. A rocky path leads upstage left, and, eventually, down the hill. Entrance to a small cave downstage center right.
Enter urbane Fidelis, leaning on a hiking stick, his sandals dusty and his toga burr-spangled.
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Poets Beyond the Barricade by Dale M Smith
In Washington, D. C. many years ago, Denise Levertov took questions after a reading and was asked if poets were obligated to protest with poetry when their government was acting illegally or immorally. Levertov replied that of course poets should protest, but since good political poetry was difficult to create, and to judge, writing letters and going into the streets were laudable, often imperative actions.
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Homebodies by Sarah Jane Sloat
If you open your hands to hold Homebodies, a chapbook of poems by Sarah J. Sloat, you find much about the book itself that makes the act feel personal, private. You’re holding paper and ribbon (the chapbook is bound by hand), looking at the cover art, a house drawn on notebook paper, beneath handmade raindrops falling, appearing to tear the page.
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