Posts by: Virginia Konchan

“Book of Dog” by Cleopatra Mathis

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The domesticated dog, evolved 15,000 years ago from gray wolves, is not a reliquary of slavish dependence in Book of Dog, Cleopatra Mathis’ seventh collection, nor is it a token of the bourgeois middle-class’s presumed benignity. It is as necessary to world ecology as the mice, ants, and moths that populate the collection, and possessed […]

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“The Children” by Paula Bohince

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The plosive thrills and quietly mournful tenor of the finely-wrought poems Paula Bohince’s The Children (her second full-length collection) reward enormously upon first encounter, and only more so upon subsequent reads. This collection reminds the reader that lyric’s static and sequential structures in fact require the reader to re-read, if she wishes becomes more deeply […]

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The Grief Performance, by Emily Kendal Frey

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Emily Kendal Frey’s compact, laconic poems from her first collection, The Grief Performance, outwit, outlast, and, eponymously, outperform not only death, but failure, ennui, and despair. How, you ask? For starters, the speaker of The Grief Performance treats poems as if they were contingent to experience (perhaps, because they are). Poem 11 from “Meditation on a Meditation of Frost”: […]

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