poetry
-
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 change from a print journal to an online one, especially…
-
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 at odds, offering her reader startling juxtapositions vis a vis…
-
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 with Maya Angelou. Every couple of years I might get…
-
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 condition are illumined in unique, resonant fashion.
-
As If the Stars Invented Dinner
So what are Mazer’s actual poems like? They are, in their way, haunted.
-
A Gap in a Two-Way Mirror
As a chapbook, Narcissus Resists works. Across nineteen poems, a conceit such as this can get old, but Hittinger keeps his book compelling and engaging.
-
Star-Smoked Skies
Kuipers is a “traditional poet” with respect to her unwavering focus on craft; the engine powering her verse is tight word choice that simultaneously conjures up tangible, living objects and powerful emotional resonance.
-
Wait
Now in his seventh decade, C. K. Williams has published many books and won the big prizes, but the poems in Wait are fresh—he does not merely rely on old blueprints, but continues the struggles that have preoccupied him throughout…