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 […]
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 […]