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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poetry review
75 posts
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.
Frenetic, Excitable, and Direct: Sylvie Baumgartel’s Song of Songs
This poem lets her—the speaker and Baumgartel—be too much.
Everything Is Alive: Dunce by Mary Ruefle
Ruefle’s memories are as alive as the bodies holding them.
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.
Inhabitation and Invocation: Candice Wuehle’s Death Industrial Complex
The speaker must believe in transience, in shapeshifting without permission.
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.
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.”
Hard-Earned, Essential Grace: Anaphora by Kevin Goodan
No elegy is an island and this elegy is no exception.
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.
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.
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.