A Kind of Balm: Angel Bones by Ilyse Kusnetz
Except she isn’t windless and neither are we, thanks to her.
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Posts Tagged: book review
Holding On: Ridiculous Light by Valencia Robin
The poems of Ridiculous Light are wary of hope yet keep thrumming toward it.
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Show without Telling: Stay by Tanya Olson
[I]f you want maximum pleasure from this collection, then, you will want to listen closely.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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HORN! REVIEWS: Song for the Unraveling of the World
Even at its most earthbound, I’d rather spend my time in Evenson’s world…
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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.
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Painful Celebrations: Five Books for National Poetry Month
Every act of reading is inseparable from what the reader has encountered before.
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Eliminated to Illuminated: Tarfia Faizullah’s Registers of Illuminated Villages
Faizullah drills language for meaning.
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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.
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War Games: Kill Class by Nomi Stone
What happens when we play along with something not real—does it become real?
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When Our Inner Voices Speak: Reema Zaman’s I Am Yours
Reema’s book teems with gorgeous metaphors.
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Melodic, Honorable Engagement: Ryan Vine, T. R. Hummer, and Norman Finkelstein
Reading Vine, Hummer and Finkelstein, in an era in which people often feel almost flattened, we rise.
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Closing the Loop: Sophia Shalmiyev’s Mother Winter
I am mother. I am child. I am mother. The overlapping, hard-won truth—victim either way, saved either way.
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Leaving a Record: Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive
How does what we choose to document dictate whose lives matter?
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Delicious Courage: Lynn Melnick’s Landscape with Sex and Violence
Melnick’s craft is in the extreme language and unfamiliar syntax which blends a brew that, while bitter, is also intoxicating.
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Both/And: Republic Café by David Biespiel
How is one to make sense of making catastrophe and making love in the same moment?
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Through the Translator’s Lens: Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough’s Objects of Affection
For Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, language provides a stronger connection with the past than nationality alone.
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An Atlas of Unmappables: Jennifer S. Cheng’s Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems
Reading Moon was a hypnotic experience for me, simultaneously immersive and elusive.
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Urgent Connections: Negative Space and Too Afraid to Cry
There’s no such thing as too much of this kind of light, especially in dark times.
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Violence and Tenderness: The Explosive Expert’s Wife by Shara Lessley
Lessley’s poems remind us: “Because to cry’s / a sign, to cry is proof, / there’s life.”
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Not a Blueprint: Casey Gerald’s There Will Be No Miracles Here
[T]his book is Gerald’s attempt to construct his own narrative as best as he can, and it’s successful.
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The Illusion of Wholeness: Sophie Collins’s Who is Mary Sue?
When reading this book, expect your notions of speaker—and even what a book of poetry is—to be challenged.
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Unsung Choices: Blue Rose by Carol Muske-Dukes
Can women ever fully escape the restrictions upon them, the risk to their bodies that comes from being born female?
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Raising the Dead: Claudia Castro Luna’s Killing Marías
The poems in Killing Marías sustain a deep reverence for women and are a call to action for the world.
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A Subjective Magic: Jenny Boully’s Betwixt-and-Between
Boully splays open her own torso and readers divine what they need to from the spill of her organs.
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Reclamation, Reassembly, and Recognition: Jasminne Méndez’s Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e
What happens when the source of grief comes from within?
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