The Crows Photo by David Trinks I left out a bowl of rice dressed in violets and honey, unsure if it was offering or temptation. A crow appeared on my kitchen counter and ate it all. The next morning the crow returned with its flock, shades draping the shagbark, all of them chanting their own […]
Sweet Field Anemoia Photo by Ashwini Chaudhary ……………….anemoia (n.) — nostalgia for a time you’ve never known ……….coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows There was, at one time, an empty field. I’m sure of it. Or, was it a forest so jaded that a vine snake’s darting left only a […]
Given the social unrest that has occurred over the past few years, it seems, at least from a Western perspective, that the direction society is headed will eventually lead us to a place that we no longer recognize. Cultural, economic, environmental, and political changes no doubt influence our day-to-day conversations and sentiments, and they quickly […]
How does a poet write down their journey of personal maturity in rendered honesty? That’s just one of the many questions that Jessica Hincapie’s debut poetry collection, Bloomer, seeks to answer. It is a book where the speaker shares a constellation of coming-of-age experiences that mirror the twists and turns of any life spent learning […]
Though I don’t follow sports in general, I never miss the Olympics. Each Olympic sport has its own highly detailed set of rules—boundaries that athletes push up against to showcase the absolute potential of the sport. Swimmers shave hundredths of seconds off of world records, skateboarders land complicated tricks that will later be named for […]
Rage Hezekiah’s latest collection, Yearn—a winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Book Contest—is so sensuous in its wanting, so powerful in the lyricism of its sexual and personal agency, so lush in its ecology, that it makes one wonder if another word for yearn might not be poem. To poem, as in to reach across […]
Dogged, by Stacy Gnall, is a collection of poems that explores the relationship between the human and the animal, the human and the monstrous, and all the points of connection in these thematic arenas. As suggested by the title, there is a recurring focus on dogs—including a distinct historical perspective that encompasses the history (or […]
Paul Klee once described drawing as “taking a line out for a walk.” Carl Dennis goes on walks in search of lines. In fact, in Earthborn, Dennis’ fourteenth book of poetry, there are about twenty references to walks and hikes and strolls—but ambulation in this book is much more than simply a “need for morning […]
Twenty-first in the Mountain/West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind, Kazim Ali, Dan Beachy-Quick, Camille T. Dungy & Donald Revell Surreal yet earthbound, orphaned yet mothered more than most, comforting yet disturbing— Tommy Archuleta’s Susto surveys many settings: the body, the soul, the terrain the soul encounters upon leaving the body. But the setting is also the […]
Ann Bookman’s first full-length poetry book, Blood Lines, chronicles the anthropologist author’s search to find meaning in over five generations of early deaths in her maternal line due to childbirth, or from ovarian and breast cancer; essentially, from the female condition itself. In detailing the tender with the tragic, Bookman deftly captures a complex ambivalence […]