Heart like a Window, Mouth like a Cliff: Poems by Sara Borjas / Noemi Press, Inc. / / 978-1-934819-79-1 March 15, 2019 / 95 pages / $15 Sara Borjas’ Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff … [Read more...]
The Utterance of Poison and Pain: Toxicon and Arachne by Joyelle McSweeney, reviewed by Mike Corrao
Toxicon and Arachne by Joyelle McSweeney / Nightboat Books / 9781643620183 / 112 pages / April 7, 2020 From the author of The Necropastoral (University of Michigan Press 2015) and Percussion … [Read more...]
To Keep from Turning Away: Ghost Dogs by Dion O’Reilly, reviewed by Michele Sharpe
Ghost Dogs by Dion O’Reilly / Terrapin Books / 978-1947896239 / 106 pages / February 17, 2020 Ghost Dogs, a witness to evisceration in five untitled parts, begins with pure gore. The poems appear … [Read more...]
Unnatural Habitats & Other Stories by Angela Mitchell, reviewed by Michael Caylo-Baradi
Unnatural Habitats & Other Stories by Angela Mitchell / WTAW Press / 978-0-9988014-6-9 / 2018 In “Animal Lover,” the first story in Unnatural Habitats & Other Stories, we encounter a post-sex … [Read more...]
Death Industrial Complex by Candice Wuehle, reviewed by Tom Snarsky
Death Industrial Complex by Candice Wuehle / Action Books / 978-0-900575-06-8 / paperback / 85 pages / April 1, 2020 If you love the life and work of Francesca Woodman, odds are good you have had … [Read more...]
Moth by Alice Pettway, reviewed by Mary Ellen Talley
Moth by Alice Pettway / Salmon Poetry / 2019 / 978-1-912561-39-1 / 64 pages Alice Pettway’s second full-length collection of poetry, Moth, is full of tight poems of travel, remembrance, nature, … [Read more...]
Red Rover, Red Lover by Preston Smith, reviewed by K Weber
Red Rover, Red Lover by Preston Smith / Roaring Junior Press / March 10, 2020 Mythology and outer space, corporeal bodies and celestial bodies interplay in stanzas and dance through couplets in … [Read more...]
Praising the Paradox by Tina Schumann, reviewed by Mary Ellen Talley
Praising the Paradox by Tina Schumann / Red Hen Press / 2019 / 109 pages / 978-1-59709-617-1 Tina Schumann’s newest volume of poems, Praising the Paradox, speaks of seasons, relationships, and … [Read more...]
Little Masticated Darlings by Lannie Stabile, reviewed by Danielle Rose
Little Masticated Darlings by Lannie Stabile / Wild Pressed Books / December 5, 2019 Memory is fragile and unreliable. We know this as studies have shown a distinct relationship between the called … [Read more...]
Birds Fly Over the Rainbow, Why Then, Oh, Why Can’t I? On Lanette Cadle’s The Tethered Ground
The Tethered Ground by Lanette Cadle / Woodley Press / 2019 / 978-0998700366 / 102 pages “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” —Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon … [Read more...]
Scream into my Mouth as a Waterfall by C. Aloysius Mariotti, reviewed by K Weber
Scream into my Mouth as a Waterfall by C. Aloysius Mariotti / Rhythm and Bones Press / 978195205000856 / 56 pages/ March 2020 C. Aloysius Mariotti’s Scream into my Mouth as a Waterfall is an … [Read more...]
David Hanlon’s Spectrum of Flight, reviewed by Kaleb Tutt
Spectrum of Flight by David Hanlon / Animal Heart Press / February 18, 2020 David Hanlon captures readers from the beginning of his evocative, shockingly vulnerable “Spectrum of Flight”. When I … [Read more...]
The Joyous Silence, Selected Poems by Maxim Amelin, trans. by Derek Mong and Anne O. Fisher, reviewed by Elias Siqueiros
The Joyous Science, Selected Poems by Maxim Amelin. Translated by Derek Mong and Anne O. Fisher / White Pine Press / 2018 / 978-1-945680-19-9 / 180 pages Part of the excitement of coming across the … [Read more...]
The Fire Eater by Jose Hernandez Diaz, reviewed by Bailey Cohen-Vera
The Fire Eater by Jose Hernandez Diaz / Texas Review Press / 978-1-68003-208-6 / February 14, 2020 Jose Hernandez Diaz’s debut chapbook of prose poems is a delightful exploration of the … [Read more...]
Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell, reviewed by Bethany Darby
Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell / Riverhead Books / 2019 / 978-0399184628 / 240 pages “In the flat darkness of the countryside. There is only disappointment, … [Read more...]
All That Shines Under the Hollywood Sign by Iris Berry, reviewed by Marc Olmsted
All That Shines Under the Hollywood Sign by Iris Berry, with illustrations by Scott Archer / Punk Hostage Press / 978-1940213057 / November 11, 2019 / 21 pages You've heard this: Hollywood is a … [Read more...]
Divided Loyalties by Nilofar Shidmehr, reviewed by Lea Bickel
Divided Loyalties by Nilofar Shidmehr / House of Anansi / 978-1487006020 / 2019 / 320 pages With Divided Loyalties, Nilofar Shidmehr takes on the demanding challenge of uniting historical … [Read more...]
The Ribbon Around the Bomb by Elizabeth Levine, reviewed by Dimitri Reyes
The Ribbon Around the Bomb by Elizabeth Levine / Finishing Line Press / 2019 Elizabeth Levine is a trilingual writer who teaches creative writing at William Paterson University in New Jersey. As … [Read more...]
Memory as Mapmaking: Reading Chew Yi Wei’s Indelible City, by Matthew Wu
Indelible City by Chew Yi Wei / Marshall Cavendish International / 2018 / 9789814794251 / 112 pages Chew Yi Wei's book Indelible City begins with a map. It is haphazardly drawn and populated by … [Read more...]
“Where the water flows down”: Wounds of Heritage and Home in Eunice Andrada’s Flood Damages
Flood Damages by Eunice Andrada / Giramondo / Sydney, Australia / 2018 Eunice Andrada’s Flood Damages is a forceful debut poetry collection that explores narratives of diaspora, family and … [Read more...]
Jericho Brown’s The Tradition, reviewed by Daschielle Louis
The Tradition by Jericho Brown / Copper Canyon Press / 2019 / 978-1556594861 Soft. When a baby is born, we call their skin, their eyes, and the top of their heads soft. Soft hair. Soft baby. … [Read more...]
Shelter in Place by Catherine Kyle, reviewed by Alexis David
Shelter In Place by Catherine Kyle / Spuyten Duyvil / 978-1-949966-40-4 / 84 pages Shelter In Place is a book which investigates safety while being under attack. Catherine Kyle divides the … [Read more...]
Imagine Touching Words: A New Lispector for Readers of English, reviewed by Pınar Türer
The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector. Trans. by Johnny Lorenz & Ed. by Benjamin MoserNew Directions / Penguin Random House / 2019 Lucrécia Neves “mulls over her inability to reason"; when we … [Read more...]
The Word Pretty by Elisa Gabbert, reviewed by Marilyn Duarte
The Word Pretty by Elisa Gabbert / Black Ocean Press / November 15, 2018 / 184 pages / $18.95 The Word Pretty by Elisa Gabbert is divided into three sections and consists of twenty-two short … [Read more...]
New poetry books by Harmony Holiday, Christina Xiong, and Lily Trotta, reviewed by Clara B. Jones
“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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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, … [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. … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 / … [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 … [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 … [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 … [Read more...]
