poetry
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The Force That Drives All Flesh
Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls is a case study for how to observe, recall and (possibly) create from whole cloth with clarity that never becomes brittle.
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Everything Tastes Better When It’s Precious
[An] unrequited love of language is demonstrated throughout The Hermit, as the speakers of the poems seem to continually give and love openly, but are often left hurting or alone—left to their prisons.
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Looking for Hymns of Seizure
There is some of Rilke’s spiritual longing in Basil, expressed most frequently through agonizing bodies and food.
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Observe as Meat Falls
This collection is not kind or nice, but the brutality of his honesty, the blunt force of his handling of subject matter, and most importantly, his emotional transparency, make this strong collection incredibly effective and worth reading and rereading.
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The Last Book of Poetry I Loved: Revolver by Robyn Schiff
How do we know what we know ’til we learn what we’ve learned? Once upon a time I fashioned myself to be one of those thinkers who, as I sophomorically put it, “find the deep in the superficial.” When I…
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All Narration Just Congeals
Cœur de Lion is a lyric book, a book about being in love with someone you can’t have, and it unflinchingly acknowledges that the person she falls for is kind of awful.
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A Nova of Votives
In this collection, the elegy as an idea is as much at stake as the lover in memoriam—in fact, it would seem that Teare has managed, through sublimation, to combine the passed lover with Elegy itself.
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Richard Siken Interview
In conversation with Bomblog, Richard Siken talks about activating truth, naming, and skin. The poet and painter reflects on how the concerns of his 2005 collection, Crush, vary from those of his current work. “Crush was concerned with now and…
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Everything Sweeter and More Fragile Now
David Budbill’s recent collection of poems, Happy Life, doesn’t beg to be discovered; it smiles and waits for the reader to take its hand and take a walk through the woods.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Meghan O’Rourke
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Meghan O’Rourke about her poetry collection Once.
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Want Some Transtomer?
Tomas Transtomer, that is, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Blackbird, an online journal, has his 1996 book, Sorrow Gondola, available on their website at the link above. The translations are by Patty Crane, and there’s a bunch of…
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A Mark of the Naive
Woodnote is a layered history, both natural and personal, that is ultimately about how we identify and describe what we encounter in the world, and how we identify ourselves inside that world.