poetry review
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Make the Words an Elsewhere: Magdalena Zurawski’s The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom
[Zurawski] is the advocate for the open exterior of poetry.
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A Tightrope Act: Frozen Charlotte by Susan de Sola
It’s de Sola’s genuineness in portraying this tightrope act that is Frozen Charlotte’s chief virtue.
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Frenetic, Excitable, and Direct: Sylvie Baumgartel’s Song of Songs
This poem lets her—the speaker and Baumgartel—be too much.
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Everything Is Alive: Dunce by Mary Ruefle
Ruefle’s memories are as alive as the bodies holding them.
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On Loss of Land and Loss of Girlhood: Taneum Bambrick’s Vantage
Girlhood remains, like the land, a constant site of male fascination, desire, and violence.
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Inhabitation and Invocation: Candice Wuehle’s Death Industrial Complex
The speaker must believe in transience, in shapeshifting without permission.
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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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Hard-Earned, Essential Grace: Anaphora by Kevin Goodan
No elegy is an island and this elegy is no exception.
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A Book with Wings: Bird Book by Sidney Wade
There is an acceptance of the strangeness of things in these poems, even a generosity big enough to invite the oracle in for dinner.
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Faith and Identity: Fireworks in the Graveyard by Joy Ladin
To “ameliorate” the desire for death or the sense of self-annihilation, Ladin finds in religion a way of reconciliation, not only within herself, but also with her community and society at large.
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Of Poetry and Protest and Monticello In Mind
Barbara Berman reviews Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmitt Till to Trayvon Martin and Monticello In Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson today in Rumpus Poetry.