In Silvia Bonilla’s debut full-length collection, City of Eves, an intimate portrait of a community of Ecuadorian women emerges through a series of lyrical persona poems. We see these women across years of their lives, starting at school and camp: “It was charity from the gringos. / The beach camp where us girls met . […]
What this book cares about most: Whole, Holy, Hot is a sharp examination of disability, womanhood, and pop culture. Chrissy Martin moves between the cold, impersonal doctor’s office and the intimate gesture of a lover rubbing their warm hands over inflamed nerve endings. Alongside the personal lyric, Martin introduces artifacts from reality TV shows, Playboy […]
Joan of Arc, probably the most famous person from the medieval ages, has had the contours of her life played out in countless incarnations across the arts. Inspired by divine visions, the historical Joan helped France repel the English during the Hundred Years’ War before her capture by the English and execution at age nineteen. […]
As the title suggests, the poems in Nanya Jhingran’s debut chapbook of poetry, Into Our Personal Weather, are inherently personal, using the natural world to convey fluctuation of not only our physical surroundings but our interior selves. The collection’s title is borrowed from a line in Adrienne Rich’s poem, “In Those Years,” in which she […]
In her mid-30s, Emily Dickinson stopped binding her poems into tidy, inked fascicles, and around the same time, she developed an eye condition that required her to stay for long periods in darkness. She wrote poems in pencil (at her doctor’s request) on scraps of envelope paper (an original choice). The relationship between these events […]
I once stood spellbound watching a dog-rose petal falling through a bramble bush. Diverted in its descent by thorns, it fell with delicacy and grace through what seemed like an eternity. It is an image that has stayed with me, as it suggested at the time something of tremendous importance; something which to this day […]
“What if there isn’t any way to touch?” Mary Ann Samyn asks in The Return from Calvary, her stunning collection about her father’s passing. The importance of touch—and of human contact more broadly—emerges immediately from the book’s cover, drawn from Herbert Gustave Schmalz’s painting of the same name. Samyn isolates a single gesture: Mary Magdalene’s hand […]
Wrecks coils around extinction. The poems in Erin L. McCoy’s debut collection are rooted in the final killing of the great auk, which was a flightless North Atlantic seabird until 1844. But each line arrives with such force—force that radiates from lyrical sharpness and a muscular amount of research—that this book reaches past the container […]
What this book cares about most: Creature in Bloom comes to focus through its tender examination of motherhood in its denotative sense with mother as the central figure more than the myriad of selfless sentimentalities the word often connotes. The women in this collection, including Hewitt herself, are messy amalgamations of younger selves complicated by […]
What this book cares about most: Hejinian’s final collection is a rigorous, playful, and meandering sequence of interwoven ruminations, narratives, and quotations, forming a textual collage that at once tantalizes and evades the reader. Hejinian’s major concerns revolve around the ways in which a hermeneutics that elevates skepticism, indeterminacy, radical subjectivity, and the imagination can […]