Poetry
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“The Crossed Out Swastika” by Cyrus Cassells
Cyrus Cassells’ fifth collection of poems, The Crossed-Out Swastika, treads the familiar yet treacherous and muddy ground of World War II. For a less skilful poet, such hostile territory may have presented an insurmountable challenge. For Cassells’, however, the atrocities…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: First Monday in October
Bob Hicok Says Believe Me: Over at The Believer, Bob Hicok fields a few questions (excerpts only at this point per interviewer Matthew Sherling) about his writing process. Hicok’s takes on on his own process reveal a darling and darting…
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You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake by Anna Moschovakis
Because approaching a lake is a strange thing, especially in the opening pages. Small detours abound.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: If You Ain’t Got Your Poetics, Man, You’re Sunk
I’m glad to see Joshua Weiner wrestle so diligently and forthrightly with Charles Bernstein’s Attack of the Difficult Poems over on The Los Angeles Review. His review deserves attention, and I hope it sparks discussion. The trolling below his review…
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“In Time’s Rift” by Ernst Meister
In Heidegger’s essay ‘The Nature of Language’ he poses the question “When does language speak itself as language?” He answers: “Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Y” by Andrew Grace
I always make my students read Andrew Grace’s “Y,” and they always hate it at first. Because undergrads are undergrads and are hung over approximately one hundred percent of Monday and Wednesday mornings. Even the enthusiastic ones balk at the…
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Thunderbird by Dorothea Lasky
Thunderbird is one of the more traditional collections I’ve come across recently, both in tone and in form. Lasky doesn’t experiment heavily with form, preferring to stick to free verse occasionally broken into stanzas. Lasky lets her words do the…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Naming Names
Michael Lista nails it with his review of The Open Door: One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine, the anthology celebrating 100 years of Poetry, edited by Don Share and Chistian Wiman. University of Chicago hails the collection as a “new…
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Having Been an Accomplice by Laura Cronk
Cronk’s Having Been an Accomplice is layered in the “imagined” of the real world, no matter the continent.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Make John Koethe’s Day
Publisher’s Weekly gives the red star treatment to John Koethe’s ninth book of poems, ambiguously titled ROTC Kills. PW’s reviewer says Koethe is “an amiable hybrid of late Wallace Stevens, late John Ashbery, and William Bronk.” It’s a sweet comparison…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Roaring Editors
The Academy of American Poets is featuring Terese Svoboda’s generous tribute to a relatively unknown 1920’s proletariat poet, Lola Ridge. Svoboda isn’t just knocked out by Ridge. She compares her in a single breath to H. D., Emily Dickinson, and…
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The Branches, The Axe, The Missing by Charlotte Pence
Charlotte Pence, author of Weaves a Clear Night has created in The Branches, the Axe, the Missing a work of significant mythic force that explores intimate circumstances of a woman fraught with sorrow borne out of problematic relationships with an…