Posts by author
Barbara Berman
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Nothing Can Outlast Its Loss
[Nick Laird’s] steps are sure, his undermusic and undercurrents consistently strong. On Purpose is a slim volume that contains multitudes.
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Like Mercury Over a Wall of Garnets
A particular joy of this book is the apprehension of current—biological, electric and historical, and in other forms—that distinguishes the most rigorously thrumming beats from their sallow imitators.
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A Gloriously Difficult World
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…
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A Rich, Prickly Sense of Expansion
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.
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The Intricated Soul
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.
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The Best of It
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…
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The Rising of the Ashes
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.
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Usher
B. H. Fairchild fuses mundane with spiritual in resolute ways, as “in the silent prayer for the grace of rain abundant,” a glorious line that would have been less so if the words “rain” and “abundant” were switched
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“I tried to remember your scent as your own”
A collection like Ohio Violence is best consumed in small doses, so that its imaginative density, which is never ponderous, can be absorbed.
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In the Fallow Air
Joanna Rawson is a piercingly passionate, necessary artist. The riches in Unrest are as demanding as they are beautiful.
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A Vestige Stirred By Light
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.
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Tissue of Flesh and Light
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.