Reviews
-
Angry Reminders: Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50
Human beings like to make myths out of things we don’t understand.
-
Transcending Metaphor: Jenifer Sang Eun Park’s Autobiography of Horse
To call [AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HORSE] unique is an understatement.
-
A Fierce Compassion: Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism
WOMEN OF RESISTANCE recognizes this reality with fierce compassion, and a lot of really fine poetry.
-
Making Absence Present: Save the Bathwater by Marina Carreira
Saudade is often translated as longing, and as with most translations, what gets left out matters.
-
A Kind of Balm: Angel Bones by Ilyse Kusnetz
Except she isn’t windless and neither are we, thanks to her.
-
Holding On: Ridiculous Light by Valencia Robin
The poems of Ridiculous Light are wary of hope yet keep thrumming toward it.
-
Show without Telling: Stay by Tanya Olson
[I]f you want maximum pleasure from this collection, then, you will want to listen closely.
-
Mindful Witnesses: Three Books from New Directions
Barbara Berman reviews work by Dunya Mikhail, Thomas Merton, and Robert Lax.
-
A Cleansing Tornado: Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff by Sara Borjas
Undergirding all the truth about pain is the triumph that comes from having a heart like a window and a mouth like a cliff.
-
A Gentle Reckoning: Blas Falconer’s Forgive the Body This Failure
If there is distance in this collection, it originates with our own discomfort with its subject matter.
-
A Hard-Won Love: NOS by Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman
The child is born of them, yet is other to them; they work on behalf, and yet despite, and also against her.
-
A Live Ember: Stephanie Strickland’s How the Universe Is Made
Over time, Strickland’s lines themselves grow wild, less uniform in their patterns of indentation. Like root structures deep in the ground, they branch in many directions.