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 […]
Reed Turchi’s debut collection, Dancing with Poets, explores what it means to make—and re-make—oneself amid a swirl of love, loss, and memory. In dive bars and art museums, baseball stadiums and blues clubs, Turchi summons his ghosts and invites them to sing their songs. A Grammy Award–winning musician as well as poet, Turchi is guided by finely honed rhythm and a singular sonic sensibility that coaxes music from poems that are narrative and lyric in turn. As a collection, Dancing with Poets remembers those the author has loved and lost, but avoids nostalgia, asking instead what futures may be built from grief and how love may grow on the other side of devastation. While the poems may swirl, their emotional truth remains crystalline: The characters, moments, and stories in each poem are infinitely recognizable—fantastic and quotidian in equal measure. Within these poems there are chicken tenders and high art, motorcycles and funerals—a familiar boyhood that happened to be spent surrounded by some of the finest American poets of the late twentieth century. In Dancing with Poets, Turchi invites his reader to join him—“to strut and spin” in grief and joy alike.
What this book cares about most: Asian Americans being made to feel invisible against pervasive whiteness. Erasure, reduction, and otherness. Personas, masking, and falsehood. Resisting the urge to become as small and quiet as possible. Internalized racism, assimilation, and disenfranchised grief. Poems that moved me: “The Other Asian Girl” “My First Beet-Colored Pee” “Mail-Order Groom” […]
From the beginning, Corey Van Landingham leaves no question as to what big ideas her book, Reader, I, will treat. She introduces us to the text with, “Reader, I was, according to Virgil, always a fickle, unstable thing. Woman. Wyf. Merger of wife and man. To indicate: not-girl. Not-yet-claimed, not-yet-weeping. And aren’t they often weeping?” […]
What this book cares about most: Death of the First Idea is a masterwork in intertextuality—weaving together the personal, spiritual, academic, historical, and cultural into a collection that expands the speaker’s experience as a Black trans woman. Language springs forth from this collection, even as many poems address the trauma and loss of transphobic and […]
By now, a new collection of Heather Christle poems comes with a certain set of expectations. Even after a decade since her last poetry collection, her voice and poetic sensibility feel immediately recognizable. In her previous books, I’ve admired Christle’s inventiveness, playfulness, and dexterity, as well as her thematic treatments of mutability, disconnection, and that […]