The Night is a God’s Wound
This [collection] is a rare effort to “open the window” for western readers onto the last fifty years of Chinese poetics.
Posts by tag
Books
1061 posts
The Force That Drives All Flesh
Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls is a case study for how to observe, recall and (possibly) create from whole cloth with clarity that never becomes brittle.
Everything Tastes Better When It’s Precious
[An] unrequited love of language is demonstrated throughout The Hermit, as the speakers of the poems seem to continually give and love openly, but are often left hurting or alone—left to their prisons.
Looking for Hymns of Seizure
There is some of Rilke’s spiritual longing in Basil, expressed most frequently through agonizing bodies and food.
Observe as Meat Falls
This collection is not kind or nice, but the brutality of his honesty, the blunt force of his handling of subject matter, and most importantly, his emotional transparency, make this…
All Narration Just Congeals
Cœur de Lion is a lyric book, a book about being in love with someone you can’t have, and it unflinchingly acknowledges that the person she falls for is kind…
A Nova of Votives
In this collection, the elegy as an idea is as much at stake as the lover in memoriam—in fact, it would seem that Teare has managed, through sublimation, to combine…
Everything Sweeter and More Fragile Now
David Budbill’s recent collection of poems, Happy Life, doesn’t beg to be discovered; it smiles and waits for the reader to take its hand and take a walk through the…
A Mark of the Naive
Woodnote is a layered history, both natural and personal, that is ultimately about how we identify and describe what we encounter in the world, and how we identify ourselves inside…
I’m Nothing If Not Polite
Notes From Irrelevance is a long weave of sentence shimmers with influences of someone who has read and absorbed a rich range, from classics to the most experimental, making each…
Fingers Through Sweat-Curled Hair
Biddinger’s repeated returns to haptic perception as a legitimized approach to the divine, or a sense of peace or benediction, amounts to an aesthetic necessity, alongside the necessity of putting…
Your Notes, Your Small Pebbles
Arlene Kim’s book details a crisis of the spirit: moving from country to country, the spirit still needs the family for support, but also needs itself to remain strong and…