A Kind of Balm: Angel Bones by Ilyse Kusnetz
Except she isn't windless and neither are we, thanks to her.
Reviews
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Holding On: Ridiculous Light by Valencia Robin
The poems of Ridiculous Light are wary of hope yet keep thrumming toward it.
Show without Telling: Stay by Tanya Olson
[I]f you want maximum pleasure from this collection, then, you will want to listen closely.
Mindful Witnesses: Three Books from New Directions
Barbara Berman reviews work by Dunya Mikhail, Thomas Merton, and Robert Lax.
A Cleansing Tornado: Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff by Sara Borjas
Undergirding all the truth about pain is the triumph that comes from having a heart like a window and a mouth like a cliff.
A Strange Liminal Space: George Abraham’s The Specimen’s Apology
Each formal experiment is a temporary hole into a new world that opens, then collapses, behind the reader.
A Gentle Reckoning: Blas Falconer’s Forgive the Body This Failure
If there is distance in this collection, it originates with our own discomfort with its subject matter.
A Hard-Won Love: NOS by Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman
The child is born of them, yet is other to them; they work on behalf, and yet despite, and also against her.
A Live Ember: Stephanie Strickland’s How the Universe Is Made
Over time, Strickland’s lines themselves grow wild, less uniform in their patterns of indentation. Like root structures deep in the ground, they branch in many directions.
Painful Celebrations: Five Books for National Poetry Month
Every act of reading is inseparable from what the reader has encountered before.
Eliminated to Illuminated: Tarfia Faizullah’s Registers of Illuminated Villages
Faizullah drills language for meaning.
Rooted to the Earth: The Carrying by Ada Limón
Limón’s ability to express her speaker’s connection to the earth, her desire to bring forth life in all its forms, is breathtaking.