Unsung Choices: Blue Rose by Carol Muske-Dukes
Can women ever fully escape the restrictions upon them, the risk to their bodies that comes from being born female?
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Posts Tagged: Reviews
Raising the Dead: Claudia Castro Luna’s Killing Marías
The poems in Killing Marías sustain a deep reverence for women and are a call to action for the world.
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A Subjective Magic: Jenny Boully’s Betwixt-and-Between
Boully splays open her own torso and readers divine what they need to from the spill of her organs.
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Reclamation, Reassembly, and Recognition: Jasminne Méndez’s Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e
What happens when the source of grief comes from within?
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Subtle Magic: Starfish by Sara Goodman
This book is a map, Dear Reader. And you are here.
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An Important Book: Inheriting the War edited by Laren McClung
There is no escape from the cradle of this shame.
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A Thin-Bladed Grace: Kristin Chang’s Past Lives, Future Bodies
Each luminous metaphor lays claim over sadness or violence, remaking it.
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New-Old, Old-New: Erica Dawson’s When Rap Spoke Straight to God
Dawson plays with many tropes—light and dark, the spiritual vs. the corporeal—while questioning the everyday myths that surround us.
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Making a Nest within a Book: Kevin McLellan’s Ornitheology
In my reading, Ornitheology turns out to be a book of psalms.
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Terrible Beauty: Diane Seuss’s Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
…in every piece in the collection, Seuss reminds us that so much depends upon noticing.
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Form as Container: Samantha Zighelboim’s The Fat Sonnets
Zighelboim almost has to break the form into pieces in order to speak; a fourteen-word poem is really only the echo of a sonnet.
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Dream Big: Hillary, Made Up by Marianne Kunkel
Hillary, Made Up is a complex feminist undertaking that undermines traditional notions of interpretation.
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A Legacy of Wisdom: The Final Voicemails by Max Ritvo
Is death a miracle or destruction?
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Hidden Just Beyond View: Jenny George’s The Dream of Reason
George interrupts us, clears her throat, makes us listen.
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Between Bodies: The Undressing by Li-Young Lee
Yet the backyard cannot exist without the intimacy of the bedroom.
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Two Extraordinary Books: Bullets into Bells and Inquisition
The obscenities and tragedies of American life pile up with speed, and in quantities, that are appalling.
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Hero and Villain: Emily Pérez’s House of Sugar, House of Stone
How hard it is to trust the difference between sacrifice and sabotage!
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A Kind of Communal History: Nepantla edited by Christopher Soto
Fundamentally, [Nepantla] is an act of history-making in verse.
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Reinventing the World: José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal
If they come for one of us, they will come for us all.
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With Great Devotion: Julie Marie Wade’s Same-Sexy Marriage
Ultimately, this is a story in which redemption is not a possibility.
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Bearing Witness: Because: A Lyric Memoir by Joshua Mensch
Because is a call for more stories with specifics so well-rendered.
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Our Lady of Perpetual Movement: Analicia Sotelo’s Virgin
These speaker(s) don’t need to offer us explanation.
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Blending Out: Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Despite its title, Oceanic is much more than a love letter to the ocean.
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Taking Control and Staking a Claim: Erin Adair-Hodges’s Let’s All Die Happy
This is lovely writing, alive, thoroughly thought, and thoroughly felt.
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The Depths We Don’t Have Words For: Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s Echolocation
[R]eading these poems feels like looking down into deep water, being able to see only so far and no farther.
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Both Insider and Outsider: Victoria Chang’s Barbie Chang
Barbie Chang is an intelligent, lively portrayal of the pressures on contemporary women (especially mothers), and a breathlessly entertaining read.
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Nesting Dolls: Julie Carr’s Objects from a Borrowed Confession
Would you say poetry, for you, is the vessel which houses all other forms? I would say it is for me.
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Reinforcing the Resistance, Aiding the Anxious: Three Poetry Anthologies
Barbara Berman reviews three social justice oriented poetry anthologies today at The Rumpus.
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A Glittering Journey: Eileen G’Sell’s Life After Rugby
These poems cast a spell, feverish and lyric, punctuated by moments of clarity: glass-sharp, hard-hitting, grounding us for just a moment, a breath, an ache.
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The Tension of Identity: Hands That Break and Scar by Sarah A. Chavez
For Sarah A. Chavez, the body works as a site of difference and violence, but also magic and wisdom.
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