Few collections of poetry are as inventive, thoughtful, and playful as Katrina Roberts’s gorgeous sixth collection, LIKENESS. This hybrid book pairs seemingly whimsical, colored drawings with single lines in all capital letters beneath them that are not captions, but more like riddles that often refer to other artists and writers. Utilizing the hybrid form, facing […]

“One is startled—by a color, into being,” writes anthologist and translator Wong May as she considers a poem by the Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei. Nothing happens in the poem, except that the color of moss amazes the poet on a dreary day. Yet, that color becomes a doorway to sudden presence. In her comprehensive […]

Brenda Hillman has thrilled me in her ten earlier books, among them her quartet on the elements, a Lucretian-achievement that gives us earth, air, water, and fire as foreground for human conditions. Hillman’s 2018 Extra Hidden Light, Among the Days, studies lichen, moss, and otherwise unattended fungi, to focus upon the days of an in-between […]

Near the beginning of her new book of poetry, Solmaz Sharif employs a startling visual metaphor to define her poetics. The poem is entitled “Visa” (“From past participle of videre or to see”): As we wait for her to exit customs, our sightline is obstructed by opaque sliding doors, the twisting hallway behind it, the […]

I recently discovered the pendulum wave. Much like Newton’s famous cradle, the pendulum wave involves a string of metallic balls suspended end to end, with some dangling higher or lower to increase visibility. Rather than lifting and releasing one, causing them to clack excitedly together, all balls are propelled sideways at once. The resulting movement […]

Reading Sara Eliza Johnson’s second collection of poetry, Vapor, evokes a feeling similar to lying in grass beneath a starry night sky: insignificance—so small, so impotently human—juxtaposed with a deep metaphysical connection to our boundless cosmos. The collection’s poems zoom in and out, from photons to exoplanets, from blood to black holes, from necks to […]

The late Dean Young resonates with insight into the human condition in writing, “. . . each of us / roams our own locked cell of perception.” Therein lies the challenge of poetry: the translation of perceptual reality into language, from one consciousness to another. Jennifer Metsker’s poetry collection Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at […]

“I WAS LIKE WEED but they didn’t smoke me” This is the opening poem from Almost Obscene, the first collection of poetry by queer Colombian poet Raúl Gómez Jattin to appear in English through the translations of Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott. In this extraordinarily dense and direct short poem, presented on its own […]

A man of a certain age greets the morning and considers ruefully the passing of years with the observation: “It’s dawn, purple and pursed in the mouth, / and we no longer wake up wild as bears at five,” and goes on to reflect that he and his wife beside him “were vaster once. We […]

Part individual plea, part millennial manifesto, Andrew Hemmert’s Blessing the Exoskeleton combines displacement, homesickness, and illumination in poems that shed their original skins and transform into new, brighter creatures with every page turn. However, Blessing the Exoskeleton is also a conversation. Postindustrial America converses with the ethics and ideologies shaping America’s mythos. It possesses a […]