Tinkering With the Closed Box
Cyborgia is wildly imaginative and the poems don’t take themselves too seriously. Even when these women are being constructed or destroyed, the book isn’t particularly angry or even political. It…
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poetry
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The Ultimate in Recycling
It’s just a coincidence that I’ll be teaching the Wendell Berry poem “Enriching the Earth” tomorrow, a poem which ends with the lines “And so what was heaviest / and…
It Ninja-Stars Me
The voice that animates The French Exit is smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of…
The Return of Tri-Quarterly
Last year, you might remember, it looked like the journal Tri-Quarterly was a goner. Lots of concerns–valid one, I want to note–about how well the journal would go through the…
Between Good and Bad, Right and Wrong
James Longenbach’s fourth book of poems, The Iron Key, feels like it has itself arrived from a different era.
The Range of Your Amazing Nothing
Lina ramona Vitkauskas asks, and her collection stands as an intrepid answer, the question as to why haute couture, avant-garde and post avant-garde cinema, Derrida, and marine life should be…
A Poetry Bestseller?
On the first day of every semester in my poetry classes, I ask my students if they can name a single living poet. About one in three classes comes up…
Mortal Geography
Alexandra Teague’s charted worlds range from the exotic to the quotidian, from Tikal to a San Francisco classroom.
Nothing Can Outlast Its Loss
[Nick Laird's] steps are sure, his undermusic and undercurrents consistently strong. On Purpose is a slim volume that contains multitudes.
Dead Ahead
Doller’s facility with language, and his wheeling imagination, which pushes language into fresh directions, never ceases to delight the reader.
Return Them to Their Sources Uninterpreted
Each conceit, each stanza, each line in Lovely, Raspberry sparkles with such wonderful ambiguity of thought that is, paradoxically, a type of clarity; through Belz’s absurdism, aspects of the human…
As If the Stars Invented Dinner
So what are Mazer’s actual poems like? They are, in their way, haunted.