Barbara Berman’s 2020 Holiday Poetry Shout-Out
Barbara Berman reviews four books in her 2020 Holiday Poetry Shout-Out
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Posts by: Barbara Berman
What We Need: Juan Felipe Herrera, Maw Shein Win, and John Freeman
Barbara Berman reviews Every Day We Get More Illegal, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, and The Park.
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Barbara Berman’s National Poetry Month Shout-Out
Barbara Berman reviews seven poetry collections to celebrate National Poetry Month.
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Courageous Music: Jane Mead’s To the Wren: Collected & New Poems
Her poems make felt observations sing, no matter the subject.
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A Fierce Compassion: Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism
WOMEN OF RESISTANCE recognizes this reality with fierce compassion, and a lot of really fine poetry.
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A Kind of Balm: Angel Bones by Ilyse Kusnetz
Except she isn’t windless and neither are we, thanks to her.
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Mindful Witnesses: Three Books from New Directions
Barbara Berman reviews work by Dunya Mikhail, Thomas Merton, and Robert Lax.
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Painful Celebrations: Five Books for National Poetry Month
Every act of reading is inseparable from what the reader has encountered before.
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Melodic, Honorable Engagement: Ryan Vine, T. R. Hummer, and Norman Finkelstein
Reading Vine, Hummer, and Finkelstein, in an era in which people often feel almost flattened, we rise.
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Urgent Connections: Negative Space and Too Afraid to Cry
There’s no such thing as too much of this kind of light, especially in dark times.
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An Important Book: Inheriting the War edited by Laren McClung
There is no escape from the cradle of this shame.
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Hard-Earned, Essential Grace: Anaphora by Kevin Goodan
No elegy is an island and this elegy is no exception.
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Three Strong Women: Lisa Rosenberg, Maw Shein Win, and Libby Burton
Welcome all three of these books with enthusiasm for what they do, and with shared possibilities for the ”craved world.”
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Two Extraordinary Books: Bullets into Bells and Inquisition
The obscenities and tragedies of American life pile up with speed, and in quantities, that are appalling.
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Bearing Witness: Because: A Lyric Memoir by Joshua Mensch
Because is a call for more stories with specifics so well-rendered.
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Three Collections in Two Volumes by August Kleinzahler
Be stunned by Kleinzahler’s poetry in the far ports of your body.
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Reinforcing the Resistance, Aiding the Anxious: Three Poetry Anthologies
Barbara Berman reviews three social justice oriented poetry anthologies today at The Rumpus.
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Logic and Lack of Logic: Best American Experimental Writing 2016
A crucial part of what makes experimental writing fresh is the way sight works with what is said, whether the material is performed or read in silence.
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The Violence of Lost Time: Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erin Mouré
Translating, in its widest meaning, is an attempt to accomplish what having a passport gives us permission to undertake.
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Barbara Berman’s 2017 Holiday Poetry Shout-Out
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Barbara Berman offers gift recommendations for the poets on your holiday shopping list.
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Let Us Be Singing Fools: Norman Finkelstein’s The Ratio of Reason to Magic: New & Selected Poems
If poetry is to remain a bulwark against the flagrant coarseness and cruelty at work in this moment of history, Norman Finkelstein’s work belongs right here with us.
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Entering an Open Doorway: Marjorie Agosín’s Las Islas Blancas / The White Islands
Agosín’s poems, though quiet and seemingly simple, linger with an interior elasticity that does not break.
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At the Intersection of Personal and Political: Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now edited by Amit Majmudar
American writers have a long, distinguished history of calling out injustice.
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Controlled Burns: Meadowland Take My Hand by Pamela Hughes
It’s old news that there’s poetry in decomposition, but welcome news that Jersey has such an astutely musical young voice.
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We Have Met the Maelstrom, and It Is Us: Dean Rader’s Self-Portrait as a Wikipedia Entry
Umbrellas are flimsy shelters from the maelstrom, and Rader keeps going because he can’t stop.
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Said Not Said by Fred Marchant
We have met the enemy on a raft of our own dead, and the enemy is us. Is it any wonder so many poets and others engaged with the arts are also devoted to exploring science?
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Of Poetry and Protest and Monticello In Mind
Barbara Berman reviews Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmitt Till to Trayvon Martin and Monticello In Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Barbara Berman’s 2016 Holiday Poetry Shout-Out
Barbara Berman offers suggestions for your poetry and poetics holiday gift-giving needs.
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