The Icelandic word for “lava” is hraun, and there are over four hundred named lava fields in Iceland. The artist Roni Horn inventoried these names in her typographic drawing Lava Fields of Iceland, a thicket of place names I used to daydream about in the months before leaving on a Fulbright to Iceland, never imagining […]
Field Notes from the Flood Zone, the fourth poetry collection by Heather Sellers, opens by recording the moments before a season of destructive rain in Florida begins. The speaker walks alone and notices details whose randomness confers poignancy: a malfunctioning parking meter, tourist shop kitsch, snatches of overheard conversation. At a bar by herself, the […]
Stephanie Burt’s newest collection, We Are Mermaids, is a time capsule of girlhood, a transfiguration of silence into song, a mermaid’s scales rearranged into poems. Each section begins with the unspoken—poems titled with blank space between quotation marks, parentheses holding air—but like the rest of the collection, Burt transforms the invisible into the visible. Each […]
As a queer college kid studying poetry twenty years ago, I felt the sting of lust as “scorpion need” while reading May Swenson’s “Untitled.” Soon after, I grappled with my own internalized homophobia, burning with shame as I read Jason Schneiderman’s Sublimation Point. Two years ago, when I first encountered Michael Chang’s poetry, I was […]
Nancy Kuhl’s On Hysteria doubts and criticizes the idea of cohesiveness—of opinions, memories, and even bodies—as a standard. The first poem, “One Story House,” states its case as subtly as the book will operate: “look // toward the world, its temporary quality / of wholeness, or else the parts into which // it is divided.” […]
Recently, I attended a wedding in the Catholic church on the campus where I went to college. During the ceremony, I remembered how my mother once offered to buy me season football tickets if I agreed to go to mass on Sundays. I didn’t bite, having fallen out with the church in high school after […]
Winner of the 2022 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Gillian Conoley Listen to Adrian Lurssen read from Human Is to Wander at the SFSU Wattis reading with Norma Cole (October 2023). If we are always at war, is all poetry then war poetry? Adrian Lürssen’s Human Is to Wander is a book of dislocation, migration, and […]
While reading Betsy Aoki’s “techno-lit” poetry collection Breakpoint, my mind kept returning to a specific quote from science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who told us that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Between its gaming lingo and automata, embedded snippets of code, and references to Silicon Valley and the Hadron Collider, it is […]
Whale Fall by David Baker (2022) W. W. Norton In poems as formally astute as they are emotionally resonant, David Baker’s twelfth collection of poetry, Whale Fall, casts an amber eye’s deep nostalgic light on a world we’re losing. This isn’t to say the poetry here mires us helplessly in a disaster none of us […]
The Forgotten World, Nick Courtright’s engrossing and multilayered third poetry collection, features the poet’s pre-pandemic, international travel as its organizational framework and ostensible subject. The book’s three section dividers list the names of countries where the poems are situated, with the last section—which functions as a sort of coda—reserved for the United States. Despite these […]