Reviews
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Both Presence and Absence: Safia Elhillo’s The January Children
The book, in the end, is shot through with a faith in human communion despite immense communal and individual loss.
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On Joy: Three Poetry Anthologies
With impermanence and “praise for the devil” all around, it’s a gift to rediscover joy, no matter how fleeting.
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Barbara Berman’s 2017 Holiday Poetry Shout-Out
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Barbara Berman offers gift recommendations for the poets on your holiday shopping list.
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Yes, and: Simulacra by Airea D. Matthews
Matthews is a poet of multivalent ways and hows, an artist at home in the riddle of refusal.
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A Book of Absences: Jehanne Dubrow’s Dots & Dashes
[W]hat’s so startling about these poems is how Dubrow spends her poetic energies grappling with the classical treatments of the past to thrilling and unexpected effects.
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A New Understanding of Experience: David Biespiel’s The Education of a Young Poet
This book will make you appreciate poetry more. And if you’re a poet, it will make you proud to be one.
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The Dangers of the Earth’s Extremes: Jessica Goodfellow’s Whiteout
The poems in Whiteout pull together an array of topics and well-developed craft, making it a complex book emotionally, thematically, and technically.
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Stitching America Back Together: A Long Late Pledge by Wendy Willis
It is late for our country. We must look back in dialogue with the founders, examine a patched-together country, an embattled flag, and consider how to stop floundering.
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Both Outsider and Participant: Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi
In Thousand Star Hotel, the bilingual writer’s struggle with expressing himself in English becomes a metaphor for the immigrant’s struggle with navigating the host nation’s hostile-yet-lucrative social terrain.
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Playing with Genre: Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling
Whether you read it as poetry or memoir, this collection will invite you into the delicate balance between the challenging, sometimes squalid, human condition and the beauty and sadness of the transcendent.
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A Deeply Human Act: Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
What is so extraordinary about this collection is its lyricism, its humanity, and its urgency.
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Reclamation and Redemption: Villain Songs by Tammy Robacker
Robacker’s language, steeped in religion and myth, creates an avenue for her own salvation while invoking a timelessness that gives voice to all whose song has been suppressed.