poetry review
-
Electric Synthesis: Drakkar Noir by Michael Chang
Chang’s style imitates internet culture and the patterns of an anxious mind. But there’s also glamour.
-
Word by Word, Brick by Brick: Christine Larusso’s There Will Be No More Daughters
In other words: Larusso does some remarkably heavy lifting in this book.
-
Exorcising Whiteness: Khalisa Rae’s Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat
Rae presents America as seen through Black girls’ eyes, experienced by our bodies.
-
A Space of Sanctuary: Mother Country by Elana Bell
The body, like a country, holds so much, and all at once.
-
Process over Product: Midst and Craft in the Real World
Calling on spirits is a communal act, multiple hands on the planchette.
-
The Light Endures: 13th Balloon by Mark Bibbins
Grief begs to be analogized, not to be tamed exactly, but somehow made approachable.
-
A Poetics of Questions: The Bower by Connie Voisine
To learn is perhaps Voisine’s primary goal in writing the poems in The Bower.
-
Not Looking Away: The State She’s In by Lesley Wheeler
But look at this poet-speaker speaking the unspeakable!
-
A Language for Extinction: Zaina Alsous’s A Theory of Birds
And if you ask of her to come to you, her answer is refusal.
-
The Violent and the Sensual: original kink by Jubi Arriola-Headley
Violence can be turned around, turned into pleasure, or an act of freedom, or an act of defiance.
-
In and of the Wreck: Together in a Sudden Strangeness
In its imagery and mood, the collection feels distinctly April.
-
The Worlds We Inhabit: Home: New Arabic Poems
These writers expand the meaning of the word home by virtue of their lives and their writing.