Poetry
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Going Back to 1968
45 years ago was a barricaded, world-rocking year. Both in politics and in poetry. Between January and the end of March came the beginning of both the Prague Spring and the Tet Offensive. North Korea seized the USS Pueblo and…
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Hider Roser by Ben Mirov
The poems that make up this collection are largely about the interior—the speakers alone with their thoughts.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Insomnia” by Elizabeth Bishop
It is near the time of my college graduation. I’m graduating early, barely 20 years old. Among my friends, the stuff of my romantic self-sabotage is legendary.
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Reluctant Mistress by Anne Champion
Anne Champion’s dazzling first book of poetry, Reluctant Mistress, offers readers a thought-provoking revision of the love lyric, rendering this rich literary tradition relevant to a postmodern cultural landscape. While invoking couplets, tercets, and other vestiges of her artistic heritage,…
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Things I Say to Pirates on Nights When I Miss You by Keely Hyslop
Pirates plunder. Pirates navigate by wit and savvy and force. They intercept us somewhere between where we were and where we think we are going to end up. They are the enemies of intention. Where we might ask, Where is…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Genius of Adrienne Rich
I’m surprised by the amiable but lukewarm reception Ange Mlinko gives in The Nation to Adrienne Rich’s Later Poems: Selected and New. The 500+ retrospective was published late last year. Mlinko holds at arm’s length the charms of Rich’s later…
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Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva
Dark Elderberry Branch is a collaboration between two living poets and one who is dead but fully present. Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa (former Soviet Union, in the Ukraine), learning English at the age of 16 when his family…
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Messages by Piotr Gwiazda
When I was young and soft and I couldn’t fall asleep at night, I’d just lie there in bed, swallowing lumps of dread whose shape and taste I had no way of understanding. To stop my mind from its looping…
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Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck
Every prison sentence represents compound tragedies involving family members and friends, the affect on the community where the crime was committed, and, of course, the prisoner whose sentence may or may not be appropriate. If the prisoner who is confined…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: My Kingdom for a Bag of Bones
Up most all of last night with some kind of malady contaminated by insomnia, my mind began to drift as a means to stem the anguish. What follows, fair warning, has little symmetry or reason and more, it seems now…
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Notturno by Gabriele D’Annunzio
Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote Notturno on strips of paper big enough for just one line a piece, while his eyes were bandaged into near blindness, as he convalesced for over two months from an eye injury. As Virginia Jewiss writes in…
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Butch Geography by Stacey Waite
Of all the stunning epigraphs Stacey Waite includes in Butch Geography—insights from William Carlos Williams and Judith Butler and Virginia Woolf—the most memorable and significant to me is the Japanese proverb which marks the second of the book’s four sections:…