Elizabeth Jacobson’s third collection of poems explores the polarities at the very heart of mortal existence—birth and death, beauty and violence, shame and desire—showing how they link us not only to each other but also to the wider living world. Its opening question sets the tone for the collection: “What is the sword so sharp […]
“To find an owl I must follow the crow . . .” so writes Mexican American poet Monica Rico in her debut poetry collection, Pinion. This remarkable book is populated by birds (by my count, a couple of dozen). The avian creatures represent the family members closest to Rico. The poet’s father and grandfather flit […]
In We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025), Patrycja Humienik journeys through memory—personal and communal—reflecting on faith, imperialism, desire, and borders. As a European immigrant to the United States, I was drawn in by the collection’s title for how it highlights multiplicity within a person, and how that fullness is a shared experience by a collective […]
The sensation of reading Sylvia Legris’s The Principle of Rapid Peering is one of catch-what-catch-can, an opportunistic experience like being a spore in an evolving world, where bird consumes moth, wind consumes bird. It is also an exercise in observation as an active pursuit. The title comes from a nineteenth-century treatise that places common birds […]
After World War II, multicultural Poland was forcibly rearranged. German speakers were expulsed from the West. Ukranians were evicted from the East. Ninety percent of the Jewish community—three million people—had already largely disappeared during the war period, subsumed by the Holocaust. When Bronisław Maj was writing his most famous poetry in the 1980s and 1990s, […]
Embedded in place and lush with family, Nathan Xavier Osorio’s collection Querida offers an intimate vision of Southern California that fortifies and fractures people who live on a desert’s edge. Querida is both a book of endearments and an excoriation of the forces that pry resources—human and natural—from a difficult landscape with no thought to […]
Do you occasionally fold an invoice into the shape of a futuristic spacecraft, or twist paper clips into Giacometti style figures? Maybe, as a further distraction from work, you might sing along to the office microwave, as the speaker does in Ariel Yelen’s fine poem “Revolution,” adding a minor third, dropping to the lower fifth […]
Upon reading Milk for Gall, the debut poetry collection from Natalie Louise Tombasco and winner of the 2023 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press, I was immediately struck by the poet’s use of humor to drive poetry into deeper understanding for readers. Take these opening lines from the collection’s first poem, “Drawbridge […]
Beckoned Back by Hell-Bent Blackbirds, Broadstone Books, 2025 Spring comes to me always as a reminder—in these tense March weeks before the crocus pierces its green dart through the dirt—that time is still also other than the accumulation of countless hours, but is a circle as much as it is a line, a return to […]
It is a shame that reading calls for a silent, sitting period. It is difficult, if not impossible, to go for a walk, to talk with a friend, to identify plants, while reading. Instead, one must incorporate reading into a life’s alternating rhythms—read, walk, talk, remember, see, and so on. Each act a distinct opening […]