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 […]
Your Face My Flag by Julian Gewirtz (2022) Copper Canyon Press Ezra Pound (in)famously defined the epic as a “poem including history.” Julian Gewirtz’s debut collection, Your Face My Flag, whose poems unflinchingly include—as Pound’s Cantos actively sought—overlaps in Economics and Power as they’ve played out both in China’s global ascendency and our increasing dependence […]
Imagine waking from a dream. You remember where you lived and the language you spoke, but as you regain consciousness, the certainty of that self slips away. Anni Liu’s poems take us to that middle space between a past version of one’s self and the present. Border Vista, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book […]
Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice is not so much a poetry compilation as it is a much-needed, staggering intake of fresh air after the world held its breath in isolation, sickness, and uncertainty during a global pandemic; after our nation emptied its lungs in violent dissent during a calamitous presidential […]
In Steven Rood’s brave and lyrical debut collection, Naming the Wind, the quixotic project of naming the wind is a metaphor for how we struggle to make sense of what is beyond our control. This is the work of a mature poet, one who makes the details of everyday life luminous and gives meaning to […]
Though in his judge’s citation Bin Ramke calls Brandon Rushton’s Berkshire-Prize-winning, debut collection of poems, The Air in the Air Behind It, “a book of consolations,” I would argue it is a book of desolations, written in a distinctly millennial voice. Clear-eyed, etched, and hard as granite, these poems catalog a kaleidoscopic array of characters […]
The nature of longing permeates Millicent Borges Accardi’s most recent collection, Through a Grainy Landscape, with poems that seek to understand the world through the pasts, presents, and futures considered by the poet herself and by immigrant families establishing their place in a new home while missing the firm footing of the homes they left […]
Anna Journey’s poems are bravura acts of sometimes goofy joy framed by a sense of mortality, the legacy of the Covid years, and also an acute physical awareness that the bodies we inhabit will betray us. The body is oddly imaged in the book’s first poem, “The Judas Ear,” a fairly literal retelling of stir-fry […]
Though Marybeth Holleman is the author of several nonfiction books centering around environmental issues and her chosen home of Alaska, tender gravity is her debut collection of poetry. Its title is drawn from its opening poem, “The Beating Heart, Minus Gravity,” wherein the speaker experiences a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, of “diving / to […]
Origin Story After Jenny Xie Photo by Yash Raut I. Once, I was a field of lost lights: shivering fireflies, the last wink of my eye. Come the faceless grass called we have something cold & circular for you to touch. Where did my limbs go? They thought of a girl carrying my name […]