Reviews
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How to Catch a Falling Knife
It is not easy to make interesting poems, yet How to Catch a Falling Knife is full of them. Part of the interest is apparent in the work the title performs: instead of shying from danger, these poems surprise by…
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Simplify Me When I’m Dead
Keith Douglas has largely ceased to exist to most readers beyond those attracted to war as a subject. The reissue of Simplify Me When I’m Dead, containing forty-one poems, aims to correct that.
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Gonville
An actor’s memoir of growing up with a dangerous father channels Augusten Burroughs, Sean Wilsey, et. al.—maybe a bit too closely.
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Complicit with Everything
A metaphorical review of Tony Hoagland’s Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, in which Johnny Rocket, Britney Spears, and the Saudi Monarchy play a crucial role in American poetry.
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The Tense, Thrown Like a Switch
Farley’s poems live in the present, the past and the future simultaneously, fully conscious of their unrest.
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Little Green
“If I ever caught you spun, we’d be over. Only one of us gets to be fucked up at a time.”
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A Gloriously Difficult World
Foreign aspects sometimes have a familiar whiff, and not just to Simic fans who have seen proof of his admission that Serbian poetry has affected his own. They have a familiar whiff because a number of poets in this collection…
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The Madonnas of Echo Park
“The border disappears, and in a finger snap we are running to cook your food, to clean your houses, to cut your grass…”
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The Indistinct Fuzz of a General Rain
World Enough is, despite the sometimes soft dulled-razor language, an incredibly smart, idea-driven book, and the in-charge idea and/or force seems to be America, viewed both from within the country and elsewhere.
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We’ll Make Great Pets
In Don LePan’s dystopian novel, the animals are all extinct and the weaker people have taken their place in the food chain.
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American Fractal
Timothy Green’s debut collection of poetry, American Fractal, picks up where scientific discourse leaves off.
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Mattaponi Queen
In this prize-winning collection of linked stories, outcasts and fuckups “dodge what dangers they can to survive in the midst of their aching loneliness.”