Throughout the collection, the speaker in these poems is constantly aware of this contradiction, the intersection between life and art, perhaps frighteningly so, seeking solace in “these few things left,” trying to reconcile, like any reasonable artist, the internal with the external. …more

Schomburg’s newest book, Fjords, Vol. 1 holds true to this idea of finding familiarity in a parallel consciousness. Just because the poems often work in a seemingly private dreamscape, doesn’t mean you aren’t invited to into the strangeness, asked to ascend and descend into the illusory.

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[Peter] Gizzi’s particular gift is to posit that shifting location where senses meet the terrible and the sublime, where political portent or its brittle actualities announce themselves in various configurations.

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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. …more

Be ready for thresholds, light and dark—in both natural and fluorescent hues—and for getting high. …more

Carol Muske-Dukes’s book seems the perfect read for this time of year when the year is winding down, yet life is still rumbling forward. …more

 Marge Piercy’s unflinching clarity of vision continues to be the kind of sturdy example so vital to literature. She has long been teaching and in the public arena, on the humane side of almost every contemporary issue. …more

In three very different but equally gorgeous sections, Griffith guides us through every poetic form from sonnet to villanelle, all while examining the idea of what it means to be in one place instead of all others, what it means not to know your own momentum and position at the same time, to never see the moon from every window. …more

These poems are often about the strange, complex and imperfect mapping of nature—human and wild—onto our 21st century lives. …more

These poems are about unintentional association, the ways our minds wander even when — especially when? — they’re trying to wrap themselves around a given idea. …more

This is an intelligent and well-crafted poetry that demands multiple readings. And it is a voice–perhaps a bit apprehensive and damaged by experience–that seems willing to express it all, even the ugly and cruel. …more

These are poems that want to be breathless, that want to mirror the intensity of passion and desire and heartbreak, and leave the reader light-headed. …more

Goldbarth still infuses his poems with an old-fashioned, childlike wonder at the marvels of our world, along with a bemused chuckle at the ways in which we so obviously fall short of our lofty goals. …more

The poems are themselves stealthy, hiding but then eventually revealing themselves to the writers. Or the stealth writers, both Seaton and Ace autonomous and authentic somewhere in that collaborative voice. …more

At Art Practical, Larissa Archer reviews Everything Is Its Own Reward by Paul Madonna, Rumpus Comics editor and artist extraordinaire.

“If there is a San Francisco state of mind—calm, unburdened with practical worries, nostalgic, slightly mawkish, indulgent of beauty (spoiled by it, even)—Madonna proves that this can exist anywhere, just as any San Franciscan knows that it cannot always exist in this city.”

Haunted by the paradoxes associated with Shakerism that both glorified and doomed it, Kirchwey uses the place of Mount Lebanon to explore a layering of spaces and themes that accesses vast time and situation. …more

The Weary World Rejoices has its unadorned moments of grief, punctuated by moments of energetic wit and intelligent levity. …more

Coleman’s work is functional and communal; she wields the oral tradition in a way that reflects her poetry ancestry—the blues queen, Koko Taylor, for example, or the fringe Beat genius, Bob Kaufman—but she also shows planed, hewn lines of intellectual poem-making. …more

Innovation is at the heart of these poems, and King’s ability to see through the surface to the deeper and often disconnected intricacies of life make them pleasurable and powerful to read. …more

What is a woman’s place in a world full of overwhelmingly masculine ideas and works? Marthe Reed, in her newest book of poetry, Gaze, examines the many intersections between women and modern society as a whole. …more

A Fire-Proof Box is a porous work, languages overlapped, breathing, an English translation that manages to capture the icy weight of classically “Russian” sensibilities. …more

The book’s strongest moments are often its quietest, as when the complexity of the speaker’s engagement with himself and the world is repulsed or rerouted by automatic prompts and alienation. …more

In Sancta, divinity irradiates. The afterlife approaches nuclear, dangerous and fascinating, a mysterium tremendum fascinans that can kill you with overexposure. …more

Out of reverence for the body’s irreducibility, Mort’s keeps strictly close to the phenomenal world, thereby freeing her imagination to honor all the body’s modes: five-fold sensuality, hunger as well as lust, youth and aging, selfishness and tender community. …more

Ideally, critics and teachers are humbled by their vocations and the artistry the vocations expose them to, encouraging effort to stay fresh , emotionally resonant and intellectually worthwhile. Say yes to all of the above when the subject is Di Piero. …more

What does it take for a person to kill a living thing, then a human being? Why are the truths of war silenced? …more

Nomura plays with language in radical and diverse ways, employing subtleties of rhythm, semantics, image, gender, punctuation, and repetition, often all within the same short stanza. …more

The field is integral, too, to Dan Beachy-Quick’s Circle’s Apprentice—the field of vision, field of the empty page and of the populated page, field of self/ body/maker, absence of field. It is from these fields that Beachy-Quick enters into a conversation with Emerson et al. …more

In Touch, Cole once again breaks into new territories of form, subject, and voice, channeling pleasure and pain into a collection of poems that triumphs in the face of their inseparability. …more

For anyone interested in the book-length poem or the potential issues that arise from combining science and capitalism, The Odicy is well-worth the time. …more