poetry review Archives

Holding On and Letting Go: Rebecca Aronson’s Anchor

Gravity is what tethers us to the earth and to those we love, but it is also what we are constantly trying to escape. Anchor is about both these states—the holding on and the letting go—and the tension between them.

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The Sense of Words: Reverse Engineer by Kate Colby

. . . language is duplicitous. To be broken is perhaps to be part of a process (or a metaphor for life), where to bend (and survive) also leads to being broken. In this context, the word “broken” in “Reverse Engineer” might well point to a hard-won success.

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Not One Thing, But Many: A Review of Cynthia Cruz’s Hotel Oblivion

How would that candy taste in my mouth? How would that blue chiffon offset my dark hair and plain features? How would the world look to me through the eyes of this woman and this one and this one? What else could oblivion mean to me, if not for the living as many?

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Calibrations: On Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality

Throughout the collection New York City reflects a unique landscape of loss, a space as full of grief as it is of everyday life, scientific facts, memory, motherhood, healing, love, and hope.

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Teaching the Ineffable: Learning to Pray by Yahia Lababidi

. . . in the end, the poem is its own witness to something indefinable with which the poet is engaged. Whatever the poet thinks it is, the poem itself is the vehicle, the container, describing itself and gesturing beyond its words.

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“Yes” as Signature and Grounding: Hannah Emerson’s The Kissing of Kissing

In this experience of oneness . . . Emerson invites comparisons to mystic poets. And like them, Emerson breaks from her singular experience to take on some of life’s biggest questions: What does it mean to be human? Why do we exist?

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