poetry reviews
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Waking Up at the Wake: Desire, Death, and Disruption in A Shiver in the Leaves
When I consider a shiver in the leaves, my mind fares in two directions: One is back to my first-time experience with psilocybin, shocked at how the fig leaves hung as if shivering . . . and the other is…
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Clearing the Bar with Care and Complexity: Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind
The Hurting Kind’s epigraph, a quote from Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik [implores] us to “Sing as if nothing were wrong. / Nothing is wrong.” When we read Limón, we can almost believe that.
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Revising Time: Nonlinear Memory in Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float
I’m getting too close to the poems, but Tierney’s collection demands a closeness.
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Far from Usual and Better for It: The Layered Poetics of Allison Blevins’s Slowly/Suddenly
Slowly/Suddenly is presented as a diptych in the Table of Contents, perhaps mirroring Blevins’s commitments to other forms of art, but her poems’ progression from Part I to Part II is not a linear narrative, not a Before & After.
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“Do You Hearest?”: A Review of Ova Completa by Susana Thénon, tr. Rebekah Smith
Where are you, Susana Thénon?—which I think might mean: How does Thénon achieve something more than evasion and isolation with all of this wandering around? Does she land somewhere?—“In a room where if I am I’m not or I am…
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Depths of Story: Who’s Your Daddy by Arisa White
The inherited wounds cut so deep one wonders if they can ever be fully healed.
