“When a woman tells the truth, she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.” —Adrienne Rich In Maafa (Fence Books, 2020), Harmony Holiday crafts a surrealistic tale employing iconography and symbolism from the African and African-American experience, creating a utopian, feminist allegory based, apparently, on the myth of Ulysses. A dancer, writer, archivist, … [Read more...]
On Courage, Hope, and Reclaiming the Future: A Personal Reflection on Marisa Crane’s Our Debatable Bodies, by Heather Derr-Smith
Marisa Crane’s new book of poetry, Our Debatable Bodies, published by Animal Heart Press, 2019 was a welcome companion to me as I journeyed alone across Bosnia-Herzegovina this past spring. Though I’ve spent half of my life in BiH since the war in the 90s. It was my first road trip driving myself alone across the country, and I had a lot of time to think. Part of my … [Read more...]
The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus, reviewed by Kendrick Loo
The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus / Penned in the Margins / 2018 / 91 pages Raymond Antrobus' latest book, The Perseverance, opens with a sentence from American poet Robin Coste Lewis: "There is no telling what language is inside the body." This enigmatic statement asks what language truly is. Language, as suggested by Lewis, exists in the realm of the interpersonal … [Read more...]
Notes and Dispatches: Essays by rob mclennan, reviewed by Julian Day
Notes and Dispatches: Essays by rob mclennan / Insomniac Press / 2014 / 978-1554831265 / 318 pages rob mclennan has operated above/ground press from his home base of Ottawa for more than twenty-seven years, publishing over a thousand items since the press’ inception in 1993. He is himself a prolific writer, with more than twenty books of stories, poems, and essays to his … [Read more...]
Little Million Doors by Chad Sweeney, reviewed by Matt Hill
Little Million Doors: An Elegy by Chad Sweeney / Nightboat Books / 2019 / 978-1643620008 / 80 pages Lines composed by a disjoint of conscious memory, shards of grief felt in the liminal spaces of shock and disorientation. Stark and spare lines fuse, then undo themselves by reversal. The poem emerges, the stance of stanzas comes with no duality by form or content. Then … [Read more...]
The Meadow by Kristin Garth, reviewed by Tom Snarsky
The Meadow by Kristin Garth / APEP Publications / 2020 Towards the end of Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 sonnets, the reader is introduced to a character known as the Dark Lady who plays a complicated role for Shakespeare’s speaker; she is at once the speaker’s sexually-alluring mistress and the tormentor/temptor of his soul, taking up enough space in his head to be the … [Read more...]
Residual sonnets by Mark Young, reviewed by Clara B. Jones
Residual sonnets by Mark Young / ma press [Finland] / 2019 / 100 pages / $5.00 Residual [re-sid-ual] Adjective: remaining after the greater part has gone “'Bricolage,' more than anything else, is the term I would use to best describe my poetry.” Mark Young Mark Young is an internationally-recognized writer—creator of vispo and text-based poetry. He also is editor of … [Read more...]
Investigating Digital Zones: Reading Ed Steck’s An Interface for a Fractal Landscape
An Interface for a Fractal Landscape by Ed Steck / Ugly Duckling Presse / 2019 / 978-1-946433-01-5 / 192 pages The corporeal and the digital are not mutually exclusive zones. Often they overlap. The latter mimicking the behavior of the former or vice versa. The programmed mutations of an organic substance. A procedurally generated landscape constructed from triangular faces. … [Read more...]
Lucky by Amy Watkins, reviewed by Lorena Parker Matejowsky
Lucky by Amy Watkins / Bottlecap Press / 2019 In Lucky (Bottlecap Press, 2019), a new chapbook from poet Amy Watkins, a woman looks back with wonder at the little girl lucky enough to be loved out of tough circumstances in rural Florida. The author revealed on Twitter (@amykwatkins) that these poems take their titles from social media prompts, and indeed … [Read more...]
The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya, reviewed by Margaryta Golovchenko
The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya / Soft Skull Press / 224 pages / 978-1593766788 / 2018 “Life’s not worth living if you’re not tending to the whims and demands of a high-maintenance lover!” (“The Women”, p. 154) You don’t always know what you’re getting into when you pick up a book. Only when you begin reading, when the first few pages begin to leave an … [Read more...]
A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky, trans. Anita Norich, reviewed by Jessica Kirzane
A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky. Translated by Anita Norich / Indiana University Press / 978-0253040763 / 2019 / 172 pages. In some ways, the narrator of Kadya Molodovsky’s A Jewish Refugee in New York—which was serialized in Yiddish in 1941 and recently translated into English by Anita Norich—seems like a typical and entirely relatable protagonist of a … [Read more...]
Transmissions from the Abyss: Sublunary Editions’ Monthly Mailings
Sublunary Editions is a publisher focused on highlighting shorter texts. Each month, they mail out an envelope with a set of two written works to their subscribers. Being a relatively new press, they have so far mailed out editions for July and August, with plans to release new packages every month for the foreseeable future. Both of the packages that I received not only … [Read more...]
Giant Steps: Fifty poets reflect on the Apollo 11 moon landing and beyond, reviewed by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro
Giant Steps: Fifty poets reflect on the Apollo 11 moon landing and beyond, edited by Paul Munden and Shane Strange /Recent Works Press / Canberra, Australia / 2019 / 101 pages / 9780648553717 In 1969 when Apollo 11 landed, I was twelve years old. I watched, rapt, as the screen of our Zenith color TV went gray and fuzzy and I heard the staticky voices of the astronauts. … [Read more...]
Ill Angels by Dante Di Stefano, reviewed by Neil Leadbeater
Ill Angels by Dante Di Stefano / Etruscan Press / 2019 / ISBN 9780998750880 / 92 pages. We rarely think of angels as being ill. If we make the assumption that “ill” is being used here in the sense of “bad,” most are considered to be good but then we remember Lucifer, the wildcard in the pack. Judging by the quotations that preface this collection, these are the ill … [Read more...]
Paper-Thin Skin by Aigerim Tazhi, translated by J. Kates, reviewed by Eric Nguyen
Paper-Thin Skin by Aigerim Tazhi, translated from Russian by J. Kates / Zephyr Press / 978-1-938890901 / 2019 Aigerim Tazhi is a difficult poet to pin down. For one, she writes in Russian in Kazakhstan, a country that’s (with its recent decision to Latinize its script) working to break away from Russia’s cultural influence. In an interview with Philip Metres, Tazhi explains … [Read more...]
Penumbra by Kate Behrens, reviewed by Michael S. Begnal
Penumbra by Kate Behrens / Two Rivers Press / 978-1-909747-46-3 / 2019 “Penumbra” is one of those words that I always think I know the meaning of, but then I realize I need to look it up again to make sure. It means “the partial or imperfect shadow outside the complete shadow of an opaque body, as a planet, where the light from the source of illumination is only partly cut … [Read more...]
out of emptied cups by Anne Casey, reviewed by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro
out of emptied cups by Anne Casey / Salmon Poetry / 2019 / 978-1-912561-74 / 101 pages The title of Anne Casey’s second collection of poetry, out of emptied cups, is drawn from the pseudo-scientific experiment that tried to weigh the human soul by calculating the mass lost by patients after death. Casey’s award-winning poems not only plumb the soul, but stagger at the weight … [Read more...]
boy/girl/ghost by torrin a. greathouse, reviewed by Danielle Rose
boy/girl/ghost by torrin a. greathouse / TAR Chapbook Series / 2nd edition reissue 2019 It may be impossible to track down an old quote I once read, somewhere, concerning The Matrix as a transgender allegory. I am reminded that the phrase I am searching for concerning a crisp concept of “pointless self immolation” may have simply disappeared into the churning … [Read more...]
not written words by Xi Xi, translated from Chinese by Jennifer Feeley, reviewed by Sherrel McLafferty
not written words by Xi Xi, translated from Chinese by Jennifer Feeley / Zephyr Press / 978-1938890123 / 2016 Xi Xi’s not written words is a youthful collection of poems that remind readers that joy can be a feeling of investigation and discovery. In its charming understatement, Xi Xi captures the beauty of a moment, that moment takes many forms: sometimes a picturesque … [Read more...]
The Anna Karenina Fix by Viv Groskop, reviewed by Margaryta Golovchenko
The Anna Karenina Fix by Viv Groskop / Harry N. Abrams / 978-1419732720 / 2018 The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature is more than your average memoir, beginning with its title. A kind of dark literary joke I still can’t help but chuckle at, Groskop uses it to set the stage for a well-balanced and thoughtful exploration of Russian classical literature … [Read more...]
Dots & Dashes by Jehanne Dubrow, reviewed by Maggie Warren
Dots & Dashes by Jehanne Dubrow / Southern Illinois University Press (The Crab Orchard Series in Poetry) / 978-0-8093-3609-8 / 2017 With chocolates shaped like fighter jets, margarita mix in washing machines, and full dress blues, Dots & Dashes by Jehanne Dubrow uses innovation in language and detail to illustrate and explain the life of a military spouse. Dubrow utilizes … [Read more...]
Language Cells: Laura Hyunjhee Kim’s Entering the Blobosphere
Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs by Laura Hyunjhee Kim / Civil Coping Mechanisms / Paperback / 100 pages / 978-1948700184 / June 17, 2019 Laura Hyunjhee Kim’s Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs is a book of speculative theory. The book explores the ambiguous and fluid qualities of the blob, shaping the primordial ooze of a quickly expanding field: … [Read more...]
Decadent Wildfire: A Review of Flowers of the Flesh by Effy Winter
Flowers of the Flesh by Effy Winter / Rhythm & Bones Press / 2019 Effy Winter is a captivating writer based in Philadelphia, P.A. Winter’s work explores unfathomable heartache and unbridled eroticism through a beguiling occult lens. Daringly self-sacrificial and ever-forthright, her debut from Rhythm & Bones Press titled Flowers of the Flesh is a fervent poetical novel of … [Read more...]
Bully Love by Patricia Colleen Murphy, reviewed by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro
Bully Love by Patricia Colleen Murphy / Press 53 / 978-1-950413-03-4 / 2019 Patricia Colleen Murphy’s second poetry collection, Bully Love, has already won the Press 53 Award for Poetry, and I’m sure it’s on its way to other honors. When I found out that her first collection, Hemming Flames (Utah State University) won the May Swenson Poetry Award, I was hooked. May Swenson … [Read more...]
Dispatches from the Mushroom Kingdom by Noel Pabillo Mariano, reviewed by Margaryta Golovchenko
Dispatches from the Mushroom Kingdom by Noel Pabillo Mariano / Hyacinth Girl Press / 31 pages / $6.00 Questions of the spoken/external and unspoken/internal sort are at the heart of Dispatches from the Mushroom Kingdom. The chapbook takes elements from video games, especially in regard to structuring, in order to explore loss, memory, the possibility of reconciliation as … [Read more...]
12 Points: Love Me, Anyway by Minadora Macheret
1. Love Me, Anyway was published by Porkbelly Press in 2018 in Cincinnati, Ohio. 2. This is Minadora Macheret’s first chapbook. 3. The speaker in these poems details three main subjects: the death of her mother, navigating Jewish identity, and suffering from Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). 4. PCOS is a chronic, hormonal disorder that causes enlarged ovaries with … [Read more...]
Earthly Whispers: On Ocean Vuong & Erick Sáenz
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong / Penguin Press / 978-0525562023 / June 4, 2019Susurros a mi Padre by Erick Sáenz / The Operating System / 978-1946031259 / July 15, 2018 Early in Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the poet pauses to reflect on Barthes: No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the … [Read more...]
Shiny Dark Mind Candy: Mayhem & Death by Helen McClory, reviewed by Laura Morgan
Mayhem & Death by Helen McClory / 404 Ink / 978-1912489022 / 208 pages There are seas where the dead lie so thick they are pressed into a layer of silt the colour of yoghurt that sits at the bottom, under all that water, waiting to be churned up briefly by the fall of the next shipwrecked boat. Scottish author Helen McClory is the winner of a Saltire Book Award and a … [Read more...]
The Experiment of the Tropics by Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, reviewed by Kendrick Loo
The Experiment of the Tropics by Lawrence Lacambra Ypil / Gaudy Boy Imprint / 2018 / 72 pages. It is difficult to unpack the impact of imperial power from culture. Some facts are historical: Asian cities like Indonesia, Philippines, and Singapore were once occupied by foreign powers. However, to assume that the word "once" signifies a freedom from imperial influence in the … [Read more...]
The short story of you and I by Richard James Allen, reviewed by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro
The short story of you and I by Richard James Allen / UWA Publishing / 2019 / 112 pages / 9781760800215 “My poems are sleeping in these pages / waiting for you to rouse them,” Richard James Allen, Australian author of eleven books of poetry, dancer, and actor warns at the beginning of his latest collection. And it’s true. You have to pay close attention, or you will miss … [Read more...]
Lizzie, Speak by Kailey Tedesco, reviewed by Catherine Garbinsky
Lizzie, Speak by Kailey Tedesco / White Stag Publishing / 2019 / 978-1732399235 Lizzie, Speak by Kailey Tedesco is a séance in the form of a book, a conjuring of the spirit of Lizzie Borden, famously believed to have murdered her father and stepmother with an axe in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1892. The form and formatting of these poems feels ritualistic, beginning with … [Read more...]
POET by Clark Coolidge, reviewed by Steve Dalachinsky
POET by Clark Coolidge / Pressed Wafer Press / 2018 Last spring I had the privilege of hearing Clark Coolidge read from his manuscript POET in San Francisco at Bird and Beckett to a capacity crowd. I was anticipating the usual wild ride. Beautifully and thickly laden improvised text special to Coolidge and his language. One of near pure improvisation and music without us … [Read more...]
Explorations in Form: Three Small Press Releases
It’s the goal of small presses such as Inside the Castle, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Schism, and others like them to publish unconventional forms of literature, those in the expanded field --- whatever that might entail. Book-objects that play with what literature is capable of, what it can do or contain. Here, I want to explore three recent projects which each use atypical … [Read more...]
Please Find Us by Wendy Oleson, reviewed by Sarah Wiggers
Please Find Us by Wendy Oleson / Gertrude Press / 47 pages / 2017 Please Find Us contains thirteen stories of survival. In the fifty-page chapbook, Oleson’s carefully crafted characters struggle to understand their places in the world. They find themselves in a variety of situations (mourning the loss of loved ones, ostracized from society, coping with dysfunctional … [Read more...]
Re- by Andrea Blancas Beltran, reviewed by Carolyn Ogburn
Re- by Andrea Blancas Beltran / Redbird Chapbooks / 2018 Andrea Blancas Beltran’s chapbook, Re-, is a beautiful, textured collection of poems centered around her grandmother’s memory loss, and her own grief. “Re-”, the simple prefix meaning “back” or “again,” serves well as a title with which to gather these poems, for without an attachment it has a blank emptiness to it, … [Read more...]
Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford, reviewed by Jared Benjamin
Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford, edited by Max Crinnin & Aidan Ryan / Foundlings Press / 2018. In the early 1970s, a poet from the Mississippi heartland, expatriated to the Ozark scenery of Arkansas, would help shape the world of contemporary poetry. A poet who wasn’t afraid to shed his smile like snakeskin and open a frown instead. A poet whose themes weren’t afraid … [Read more...]
The Wrench and Reach of Grace: Feet of the Messenger by H.C. Palmer, reviewed by Wm. Anthony Connolly
Feet of the Messenger by H.C. Palmer / BkMk Press / 9781943491100 / 2018 Everything is here and now --- childhood, beauty, war, peace --- all apiece of a tapestry woven by the expert hands of the warrior poet H.C. Palmer in his debut collection, Feet of the Messenger. The collection of free verse, culled in three sections, presents the entangled memories of a Kansas … [Read more...]
A perimeter by rob mclennan, reviewed by Ali Znaidi
A perimeter by rob mclennan / New Star Books / 978-1-55420-128-0 / paperback / 80 pages / 2016 In A perimeter rob mclennan has ordered the poems which were written between 2010 and 2014 in a way that the cumulative force makes us savour those new things that have happened to him: A new daughter; Rose, a new lodging experience, and a new surrounding. This is shown from the … [Read more...]
Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer, reviewed by Beth Spencer
Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer / Random House / 320 pages / 9780812995701 / Jan 29, 2019 Stop the presses! Stop submitting to them, that is, until you’ve taken a look at Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, which comes out at the end of January this year. Chances are good that if you’re bothering … [Read more...]
The Exile Illuminated as the Native Returned: Steve Dalachinsky’s Where Night and Day Become One: The French Poems / A Selection 1983-2017
Where Night and Day Become One: The French Poems / A Selection 1983-2017 by Steve Dalachinsky / great weather for MEDIA / 978-0998144030 / 2018 The American artist's fascination with France has been long lived and well covered. No matter how many American writers travel to Paris, readers still remain intrigued by the journey and the transformation that occurs while the … [Read more...]
