A Poetic Smorgasbord: A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Each sentence is calculated; each word explodes.
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Posts Tagged: book review
A Fantastic Communion: Renaissance Normcore by Adèle Barclay
Salt—the speaker’s only remains, after she dives into the ocean and sets herself free of the past.
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Trauma as Inheritance: Adam P. Frankel’s The Survivors
The survivor is left to ponder whom he has become.
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Observations of an Inquisitive Mind: Fruit by Bruce Snider
These are not poems of self-pity. Far from it.
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Quiet, Radical Defiance: The Equivalents by Maggie Doherty
Education, work, study: these were not simply a means to an end.
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Straining Toward “Memory Care”: Victoria Chang’s Obit
For Chang, figurative language proves unsatisfactory when compared to the depth of her grief.
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An Irony Full of Grace: John L’Heureux’s The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast
The horror of violence is not assuaged by announcing it quickly.
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Mothers and Daughters: Girl by Veronica Golos
Bodies become something to escape from or leave behind.
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Lingering on Darkness: Sleepovers by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
When Ashleigh Bryant Phillips lets loose, she can shock.
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Let Our Rage Become a Storm: Kelly Grace Thomas’s Boat Burned
In this collection, women are “vesseled,” carrying the burdens of our culture.
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Outsiders Looking In: Subduction by Kristen Millares Young
Central to Subduction is the question of cultural ownership, namely in story.
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Fractured Realities: Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras
We fail in sympathy with the world, but we write apart from it.
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A Cave of Catharsis: Code by Charlotte Pence
Grief sneaks up on you, and so does this book.
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When Background Becomes Foreground: Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown
Chinatown comes to vivid life in Yu’s hands.
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Make the Words an Elsewhere: Magdalena Zurawski’s The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom
[Zurawski] is the advocate for the open exterior of poetry.
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Constant Motion: Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
More than a longing for an origin story, Hernandez Castillo’s memoir is an attempt to bring the invisible to light.
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Paranoid Reality: Monica Sok’s A Nail the Evening Hangs On
A loss is a loss. Neither the circle nor the form can be completed.
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Tech Is Boring: Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
Luckily, Wiener offers us more than eloquent masochism.
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The Poem Must Forgive: E. J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others
Empathy and forgiveness must begin with understanding.
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How to Write about Nothing: Kate Zambreno’s Drifts
But the evasion is purposeful, and the purpose is to marvelous effect.
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A Tightrope Act: Frozen Charlotte by Susan de Sola
It’s de Sola’s genuineness in portraying this tightrope act that is Frozen Charlotte’s chief virtue.
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Frenetic, Excitable, and Direct: Sylvie Baumgartel’s Song of Songs
This poem lets her—the speaker and Baumgartel—be too much.
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Everything Is Alive: Dunce by Mary Ruefle
Ruefle’s memories are as alive as the bodies holding them.
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On Loss of Land and Loss of Girlhood: Taneum Bambrick’s Vantage
Girlhood remains, like the land, a constant site of male fascination, desire, and violence.
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The Joypain of Parenting: Lydia Kiesling’s The Golden State
This is both the exercise and exorcism of motherhood.
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Inhabitation and Invocation: Candice Wuehle’s Death Industrial Complex
The speaker must believe in transience, in shapeshifting without permission.
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Queer Logic: Females and My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
“Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” A provocation. An invitation.
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Man vs Man vs Nature: Beyond the Sea by Paul Lynch
So begins an odyssey of survival. Will they make it?
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For the Love of Dogs: Jennifer Finney Boylan’s Good Boy
In this sense, [the dogs] are a perfect foil for the conflicted young author.
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The Joy of Play: Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces (10th Anniversary Ed.) by David Biespiel
Biespiel offers a number of best practices—not just for writing poems, but for living a creative life.
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