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 […]
In Laynie Browne’s fourteenth book of poetry, Translation of the Lilies Back Into Lists, the poems are titled after dates—progressing chronologically from 12.16.15 to 5.23.16—and each line is numbered. Browne describes her process of writing the book as one of translating her daily to-do lists, line by line, into poetry. She says that the project […]
In Abigail Chabitnoy’s second collection, In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful, the speaker pulls us under again and again. As we follow her into the waves, we see her unearth the bodies of indigenous women and hear her unleash their voices. In complex, confident lyrics, Chabitnoy also unearths language for her readers, in translations […]
Listening to Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land: Suite always makes me cry. Tears evoked by certain passages of music and scenes of loveliness issue from some deep well of emotion felt as a vague ache, a foreshadowing of loss as much as an overflow of emotion. I’ve also felt this ache in amazed recognition of […]
William O’Daly is known as one of the preeminent translators of the poetry of Pablo Neruda in the United States and a cofounder of Copper Canyon Press. Astonishingly, for all he has done over many decades of service to poetry and its communities, The New Gods is O’Daly’s first full-length collection, though he has authored […]
The pleasure of writing a book review is, for me, found in the deeper level of engagement required as opposed to that with works I might be reading for other intentions. And so I found myself starting and restarting Robert Davis Hoffmann’s Raven’s Echo, not for any shortcomings of the work itself, but interruptions of […]