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“A rose is arrows is eros,” as one poem has it, and who is to argue? Love and lyricism are all the better for their queerness. Brolaski, with a powerfully trans poetic, instructs us on just this fact, cloying power dynamics, pulling hair, and refusing any of the quaint old boundaries.
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McSweeney asks us to inhabit the conflicting edges of that reality, mouthing the power and joy that come with degeneracy.
...moreMany of the most interesting lyric books of the past few years have attempted a sort of reckoning between contemporary life and the reality of ceaseless war. Nick Flynn’s The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, Fanny Howe’s Come and See: these are books that consider what it means to live familiar patterns, yet […]
...moreGuide to Capturing a Plum Blossom could fit neatly into any number of contemporary-sounding categories: hybrid text, art book, lyric essay, etc. It is a book that relies on interdependence of image and text, of history and the present, of evocation and concrete image.
...moreThe 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.
...moreNomura 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.
...moreThis… collection offers a world where narrative, grammar, and logic all come and go, rising up familiarly for a few lines then dispersing again, something thrilling and unrecognizable in their place.
...moreCœur de Lion is a lyric book, a book about being in love with someone you can’t have, and it unflinchingly acknowledges that the person she falls for is kind of awful.
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