Personal to Universal: Robin Becker’s The Black Bear Inside Me
Becker stands firmly on the shoulder of earlier lesbian-feminist poets while inhabiting and describing our current era of new challenges and old shibboleths.
Reviews
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Straddling the Divide: Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Interior States
The entire collection is suffused by an aching awareness of absence and an obsession with the indelible markings of the past.
New-Old, Old-New: Erica Dawson’s When Rap Spoke Straight to God
Dawson plays with many tropes—light and dark, the spiritual vs. the corporeal—while questioning the everyday myths that surround us.
Twenty Years of Miseducation: Joan Morgan’s She Begat This
Morgan has a lot of gaps to fill—and a lot of traps to potentially fall into.
Making a Nest within a Book: Kevin McLellan’s Ornitheology
In my reading, Ornitheology turns out to be a book of psalms.
My Nebraska is Only One Nebraska: Erica Trabold’s Five Plots
Five Plots wades into the enigmatic relationships between family and memory, where truth is seemingly as placid as the Platte River but re-examination causes a re-route.
Hard-Earned, Essential Grace: Anaphora by Kevin Goodan
No elegy is an island and this elegy is no exception.
This Peculiar Burden: Wesley Yang’s The Souls of Yellow Folk
Yang boasts an admirable track record in publishing on a variety of subjects, but a highlight reel does not a cohesive collection make.
Obsession and Impulse: Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights
The words act as a push, like a wind at your back.
Terrible Beauty: Diane Seuss’s Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
...in every piece in the collection, Seuss reminds us that so much depends upon noticing.
A Weeping Tree of His Own: Yasunari Kawabata’s Dandelions
Blindness as a concept is central to Kawabata’s novel, where every character is blind to something.
Form as Container: Samantha Zighelboim’s The Fat Sonnets
Zighelboim almost has to break the form into pieces in order to speak; a fourteen-word poem is really only the echo of a sonnet.