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 […]
Rebecca Aronson’s Anchor provides consistent reminders of what it means to be part of a family, to be human, to be embodied. This collection of poems brings together the themes of death and grief, anxiety, and identity like materials forming a nest—each is delicately intertwined with the other so that, at each line, readers can […]
For the past few years, I’ve watched my father’s steady decline as he’s suffered from an incurable disease: Alzheimer’s. Each month, each week, each day, words are erased from his brain. It’s terrifying to watch someone you love lose their grasp of language. At the same time, the space in which someone lives with Alzheimer’s—that […]
In her intimate collection fretwork, Michele Glazer creates an expansive elegy that views loss from multiple vantage points. By not dividing fretwork into sections, Glazer builds a moving narrative focused on the loss of her mother and father. Yet fretwork is as much about Glazer finding her own place within the mourning of her parents. […]
Questions From Outer Space is about coming to terms with humanity’s destructive choices and orienting ourselves to life as a result. Diane Thiel’s poems lament our destruction of planet Earth and caution against how technology separates us from one another—yet the book ultimately presents a message of hope. These poems offer the possibility of solace […]
The provost taught me truth was thin as paper—the little circles she punched in it remain, and still I hold this punctured story to the light. We all have our minor (or major) academia horror stories. I won’t […]