In Beauty Bright by Gerald Stern
Having never read Gerald Stern’s poetry before, I took This Time: New and Selected Poems out from the library. The book won the National Book Award in 1998, and it…
Reviews
2632 posts
“Descanso for My Father,” by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
Like the dreamlike shadowboxes of Joseph Cornell, Fletcher assembles scraps of imagery and inherited keepsakes into an enchanting quest to understand his family’s stories. Yet the abundant images with which Fletcher crafts his essays serve best as they buttress the unknown.
“Summer of Hate,” by Chris Kraus
It’s appropriate to read Chris Kraus’s Summer of Hate in the middle of the winter. The novel is perfect for January and February, being very fast moving and set in…
Counterpart by Elizabeth Robinson
Marisa Siegel reviews Elizabeth Robinson’s Counterpart today in Rumpus Poetry.
Periodicity by Iris A. Law
Iris A. Law’s fearless debut work, Periodicity, operates through a unique structural conceit that lushly unfolds across the arc of the chapbook: each poem takes as its subject matter a…
Wikipedia Says It Will Pass by Diana Salier
Wikipedia is not to be trusted, at least not entirely. We all know this. (For a brief period in August of 2009 the first sentence of the “Trees” poet—“Poems are…
“Shadow Man,” by Gabriel Blackwell
There’s a scene in The Maltese Falcon in which the actress Mary Astor is pretending to be a woman named Brigid O’Shaugnessy who has been pretending to someone named Ruth Wonderly,…
“What’s to Become of the Boy?” and “The Collected Stories,” by Heinrich Böll
In one of her letters, Flannery O’Connor noted that many Catholics end up suffering as much or more from the Church itself as from those who oppose it and its…
“Stingray Clapping” by Andrew Choate
Perhaps what is most thrilling about Stingray Clapping, Andrew Choate’s enigmatic collection of tonal, non-sequitur phrases, is that the book compels the reader to imagine the amoral absurdities of phrases…
“American Mastodon” by Brad Ricca
Few poets choose to share poignant emotions with a cheeky smile and a sly wink. It is rare indeed when a poet manages to successfully blend comedy with genuine emotional…
“Unruly Voices,” by Mark Kingwell
In his home country of Canada, Mark Kingwell is something of a celebrity philosopher—a public intellectual who, in addition to writing many readable books and winning teaching accolades, makes frequent…
“Fancy Clapping” by Mark D. Dunn
How many contemporary Canadian poets can I name? Not many, which makes me feel stupid, especially since the books I have read by Canadian writers are so good. Mark Dunn…