I’m fat. No matter where it stations itself then—against the sunset, unto the dawn, in the most awake and aware of lights at the gas station or drive-thru—my silhouette is…
Every once in a while, when I’m reading something, sorting through the words in a half-daze, my brain will just click. I’ll get it. I’ll take on an understanding of…
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…