Reviews
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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.
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Poetry That Makes You Nearly Miss the Plane: The Complete Works of Pat Parker edited by Julie R. Enszer
In other words, sometimes we need to be jolted out of our predictable behaviors and routines. We need the kind of reading that scatters us, pulls and weaves our cerebral, emotional, and visceral chains.
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Controlled Burns: Meadowland Take My Hand by Pamela Hughes
It’s old news that there’s poetry in decomposition, but welcome news that Jersey has such an astutely musical young voice.
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An Ambitious Atlas of Fears: Catherine Pierce’s The Tornado Is the World
Pierce’s poems approach danger from surprising angles. Do you fear the tornado? Then come inside it and hear it speak.
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A Very Great Scoundrel: The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volume III: Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks
In hindsight, it’s sometimes difficult not to read more than a bit of sadomasochism into Hopkins’s inner passions and the ways in which he resisted them.
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All of the Facts and None of the Truth: Fox Frazier-Foley’s Like Ash in the Air after Something Has Burned
While these women are physically gone, they gain agency after their deaths through Frazier-Foley’s poems.
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Pressing Back against the Pressure: A Woman of Property by Robyn Schiff
It’s about pressure. The pressure of one being enveloping another being, of one mother hugging her child, of a greater force subsuming and defining a lesser.
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The Queer Valentine of the Century: Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet
In Full Velvet offers the truth of a woman’s life—the queer truth, the queer rose, the queer valentine. And everything is different after that moment of initiation, instantiation.
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We Have Met the Maelstrom, and It Is Us: Dean Rader’s Self-Portrait as a Wikipedia Entry
Umbrellas are flimsy shelters from the maelstrom, and Rader keeps going because he can’t stop.