In Ezra Miles’s The Signalman, the weight of silence and solitude lowers and reshapes an individual during extended periods of time. The verses in Miles’s debut collection focus on the poet’s time working in a rural signalbox, a place where the isolation eventually leads the poems’ speaker into various conversations with God. Simultaneously, the speaker […]
Katie Naughton’s first book of poetry, The Real Ethereal, is as timely as it is transcendent of time and space: it is simultaneously an inventory and a spiral, resigned and hopeful, affirming and disarming. Naughton accepts the responsibilities of life on earth with the responsibility of a poet and writer: “sounds of daily being / […]
Dorinda Wegener’s debut collection Four Fields builds a world for the reader to step into from the first poem. A Perianesthesia Certified Registered Nurse in Richmond, Virgina, with work published in journals such as Indiana Review, THRUSH, and Hunger Mountain Review, Wegener reveals a house and garden, a homestead and family, dark woods and strange […]
Fanling in October opens with a journey back to Pui Ying Wong’s Hong Kong roots, as questions of memory, home, and loss ebb and flow alongside equally personal inquiries into the nature and role of poetry for a poet and for humankind. Much like the waterways, squalls, and quiet rainfalls that wend throughout Wong’s collection, […]
Incorporating a few of the poems and themes that appeared in his collection Night Logic, Matthew Gellman reprises his poems of loss, retrospection, and family in the deeply psychological collection Beforelight. In these tender poems of personal and familial exploration, readers find a speaker tuned to nature and keen on taking the fragile elements of […]
Dripping with water and blood, bursting with song and mourning, dancing with ancestral and future bones, To Be Named Something Else moved me in entirely new ways. Immediately, I proceeded to read it again. I needed to know how she did it. How did every poem grip me, tip me, thrill me, spill me? What […]
As I read Synthetic Jungle, the third full-length collection Michael Chang has published since 2021, I couldn’t help but contemplate the cattiest, most cutting thing that could be said about it. One of the pleasures of Synthetic Jungle is the gossipy, skeptical eye Chang trains on everything they observe, so a wry send-up seems like […]
Nicholas Gulig’s third collection of poetry, The Other Altar, unearths a landscape where the experience of loss is both local and global, personal and political, here and far away. The speaker of these poems wanders in a world illumined at every turn by ghosts whose shape and form he hopes to language in a litany […]
Photo by Rene Böhmer on Unsplash One of us hears from her last week at a Crisis Prevention Meeting. One of us hears her speaking in Ainu. It isn’t Ainu we decide because it is also dying or dead by some reports. It must be pieces of many languages strung together with a syntax more […]
Photo by Yoksel Zok on Unsplash A daffodil. A blanket. A bike. A pink geode exploding with crystals. A pair of ducks paddling upstream. An oatmeal cookie made by a woman who has been making them for 70 years. A tender, young branch from an apple tree. A gift. An offering. A conch shell smooth […]