Love, An Index tells a beautiful and heartbreaking story, and at the heart of it is some of the most original and interesting poetry that I’ve come across in a…
Newly appointed Washington State Poet Laureate, Kathleen Flenniken, recently released a second book called Plume, part of the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series of University of Washington Press. I will admit,…
In Vanishing-Line, Jeffrey Yang writes, “But the birches of Yennecott/ recall his word-spirits.” Rather than using lines or stanzas as the basic unit of expression in this collection, Yang writes…
As its title suggests, Compendium, poet Kristina Marie Darling’s second book of poetry, is a short collection of poems compiling an incomplete history. Calling the book experimental, fails to tell…
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…
Many 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…
Rebecca Lehmann’s collection, Between the Crackups, is a glittering, furious book. Many of its poems inhabit a childhood world full of violence and anger. Others showcase adult voices that range…
Visiting the Taos Pueblo (“an ancient community continuously inhabited for 100 years”) on San Geronimo Day, I was frightened by the Sacred Clowns (Koshares). The list of rules for visitors…
Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog, reports that poet Joshua Clover and 11 students at UC Davis are potentially facing a $1 million fine and up to 11 years each in…