poetry review
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Bringing to Light: A Gathering and Tethering of Memory in Darla Himeles’s Cleave
Poems echo, rebound, and speak to one another.
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Bright Buoy, Dark Sea: Kelli Russell Agodon’s Dialogues with Rising Tides
Like a buoy, Agodon’s poems rise above and go below the surface.
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Projective Wonder: Imagine Us, the Swarm by Muriel Leung
The individual and the crowd might prove as false a binary as anything else, even that [perforated] line sketched between poetry and prose.
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Of Language and Lineage: Carlina Duan’s Alien Miss
All the while, the sound of the poetry behind the telling is sharp, rhythmic, and controlled.
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A Multi-Modal Study of Exquisite Blackness: Krista Franklin’s Too Much Midnight
In Franklin’s telling, we are not just born, but fervent in our existence.
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Like Clockwork, Like Memory: There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife by JinJin Xu
How to live with a love so intense, a pressure so ripe?
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Lightning Rods and Line Breaks: The Malevolent Volume by Justin Phillip Reed
Frighteningly detailed, this poet knows horror well.
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There Are No Cheap Seats in Lauren Shapiro’s Arena
Resonance is a given. You can’t help but hear. In Lauren Shapiro’s Arena, every seat is the best seat in the house.
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Both Microscope and Telescope: The Absurd Man by Major Jackson
The Absurd Man is confident and daring with a muscular specificity of language that is both deeply resonant for a wide audience and also singular to the poet.
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Inner Conversations Projected on a Surface: Bruno K. Öijer’s The Trilogy
A family’s grief traps generations in a search for insight.
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To Set Asunder: The Separation and Synthesis of Tiana Nobile’s Cleave
A word becomes a reckoning, a reconciling of contradiction.
