Reviews
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A Tour de Force of Grief: Sun & Urn by Christopher Salerno
The winner of the 2016 inaugural Georgia Poetry Prize, Sun & Urn is gloomy and luminous, nostalgic and hopeful, moribund yet brimming with life.
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Coursing Byways and Biographical Thoroughfares: Karin Roffman’s The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life
I’ve long found that when reading Ashbery’s poetry it’s easy to lose track of just who the poet is.
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Glimpsing the Colors of the World: Nancy Chen Long’s Light Into Bodies
As a white mother of biracial children myself, this book became for me an opportunity to glimpse, for a moment, the colors of the world, and of skin, as my children might.
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Entering an Open Doorway: Marjorie Agosín’s Las Islas Blancas / The White Islands
Agosín’s poems, though quiet and seemingly simple, linger with an interior elasticity that does not break.
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A Reluctant Chronicling: Natalie Shapero’s Hard Child
“I typically hate discussing the past,” the speaker admits in the title poem, “Hard Child,” then a few poems later, a little more defensively—“I swear to God I hardly think of the past.”
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More Than Vicarious: Conflation and ALOHA / irish trees
In this intimate, auditory format, you can hear the poets’ pages crinkling as they turn them—such a reassuring sound—turning pages instead of scrolling screens!
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Both Beauty and Horror: Water & Salt by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Tuffaha harnesses the legerdemain of lyric to link love and grief, anger and hope.
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Navigating Empathy: Camille T. Dungy’s Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History
Luckily for us, Dungy’s increase in empathy and experience coincides with her embrace of the braided essay: her thinking crashes people, places, and ideas against each other in unexpected and adventurous ways.
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At the Intersection of Personal and Political: Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now edited by Amit Majmudar
American writers have a long, distinguished history of calling out injustice.
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Beauty Undercut by the Possibility of Terror: Afterland by Mai Der Vang
Precariousness is an essential condition of life for the people who populate Vang’s poems, especially the Hmong refugees on whom the poet’s eye most lovingly lingers.
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The Impossible Question: Vagrants & Accidentals by Kevin Craft
How are we to live when loss—personal, environmental, and political—is heaped upon loss?
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Earnest, Funny, and Fun: Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities
What makes Chen’s poetry so exhilarating is that these poems always have a center of gravity—the self—that keeps the many subjects they explore in orbit.