Reviews
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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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Unsettled Terrain: Rummage by Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa
If shame works by convincing us that we are bad, by pinning us into a definition of badness, then the poems in Rummage resist by refusing to be pinned at all.
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An Invisible World: Tomas Tranströmer’s The Half-Finished Heaven: Selected Poems (Expanded Edition)
The poem, [Tranströmer] seems to say, doesn’t have to carry every burden of its poet’s heart. It doesn’t need to speak out loud, either.
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This Most Vulnerable of Houses: Fady Joudah’s Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance
These poems, poised at the intersections of the material, the metaphorical, and the spiritual, fold into and out of one another as their boundaries dissolve with question after question.
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Wide-Eyed and Awed: Keegan Lester’s this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all I had so I drew it
Lester often weaves past and present, the personal and the vast into one poem, leaping between these seeming opposites.
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So Much Love of Death: A Crown of Violets by Renée Vivien
Translation always sacrifices something, and Pious, in her translations, has been consistent about the choice to cleave to some formal principles and lean away from others.
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An Arduous Reality: Testify by Simone John
Simone John’s first full-length collection of poems, Testify, is a remarkable exercise in documentary poetics.
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Map-Making: Alex Dimitrov’s Together and By Ourselves
At one point, I write in my margin: There is no X marks the spot for treasure here. The map is the treasure. Which is another way of saying: this book is the bounty; these poems are the gold.
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The Violence of Lost Time: Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erin Mouré
Translating, in its widest meaning, is an attempt to accomplish what having a passport gives us permission to undertake.