Drinking a Glass of Light
The emotional theme of the volume, the nostalgia and death that is announced in the book’s title and reaffirmed in almost every poem to some extent, is what I know…
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Wind and Rain Make No Difference
Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom could fit neatly into any number of contemporary-sounding categories: hybrid text, art book, lyric essay, etc. It is a book that relies on interdependence…
What You Lost Is What Everyone Lost
Often, in contemporary literature, grief becomes clichéd; O’Rourke, however, avoids sappiness or melodrama. Instead, her poetry probes at the actualization of grief, revealing a startling emotional depth.
Thorns In Our Hair, But Never a Shroud
Used well, the collective perspective affords the poet a wider voice, a surer sense. The reader feels present in these moments of ruin, trusting even the more fantastical occurrences.
selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee
When Boyle is insightful, this style allows the brilliance of the insight to shine through unfiltered and unaided by the mechanisms of literature and poetry, sometimes with powerful effect.
God’s Geese Go To Pond
Now, with the Wave Books release of Aygi’s poems, translated masterfully by Sarah Valentine, audiences worldwide are able to celebrate Aygi among his Russian contemporaries.
We Rode into Total Downpour
The poems run between lyric and narrative with many of them having a steam-of-conscious-like feel as the speaker makes leaps in ideas and imagery from line-to-line.
A Flower Too Often Smelt Will Wilt
This is a hybrid book that chronicles the real journey and imagines the surreal journey of Lewis and Clark, from watching a baseball game with President Jefferson and Ozzie Smith,…
Thumbs In, Fingers Splayed
Throughout the collection, the speaker in these poems is constantly aware of this contradiction, the intersection between life and art, perhaps frighteningly so, seeking solace in “these few things left,”…
Trees Are Blooming Into Bright Lightbulbs
Schomburg’s newest book, Fjords, Vol. 1 holds true to this idea of finding familiarity in a parallel consciousness. Just because the poems often work in a seemingly private dreamscape, doesn’t…
The Whole Vortex of Home
[Peter] Gizzi’s particular gift is to posit that shifting location where senses meet the terrible and the sublime, where political portent or its brittle actualities announce themselves in various configurations.
We’ll Call Them Contact Zones
Based in research of museum design, and memorialization, Slot’s narrator moves inside public landmarks dedicated to various disasters—9/11, slavery, Hiroshima, the Holocaust— and explores ways memorialization acts on conscience and…