I am writing this review on a day when my dog is particularly anxious and vexing in her refusal of all efforts to assure her. Gone with the first keyed letter but there when I opened this document to begin, my Word’s new Copilot feature—included in the latest update with no regard for whether or […]
Theory of the Voice and Dream refers to Liliana Ponce’s Teoría de la voz y el sueño, the book of poems translated by Michael Martin Shea in World Poetry’s edition and consists of two Ponce collections: Teoría (2001) and Fudekara (2008). Both of Ponce’s books were published by tsé tsé, an influential Buenos Aires press […]
Forthcoming December 2025 Begin Where You Are: The Colorado Poets Laureate Anthology is a book of firsts. It is the first ever US state poet laureate anthology. It is the first poetry collection featuring all ten Colorado poets laureate (the second oldest state poet laureateship, established in 1919). And it is the first place […]
What this book cares about most: Rodeo embeds the grief over the stillbirth of Wilkinson’s son into a western landscape of pasturelands, canyons, and the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The immeasurable changes wrought by grief shift Wilkinson’s relationships—with her husband and sons, the people she encounters, and her daily chores and habits. Rodeo attempts […]
What this book cares about most: Conversations with a community that cannot speak back; namely, the Chinese railroad workers whose histories and crucial contributions to the book’s Lake Tahoe region have been largely lost to time and intentional, violent erasure. In a long central poem titled “高 祖 父 : A Correspondence : 太 爺,” […]
Jordanian poet Siwar Masannat’s Cue (University of Georgia Press, 2024) is a finely wrought and complex hybrid work. Its ekphrastic poetry is in conversation with artist Akram Zaatari and his “excavation” of photographer Hashem El Madani’s portraits, taken in Lebanon in the 1940s to the 1970s, which depict heteronormative family, same-sex portraits, and physical affection. […]
An old West Irish response to the knock of an unexpected visitor—“Are ye of the living or of the dead?”—prefaces this collection and might be taken to refer to any number of characters gracing these pages; indeed, we are left wondering if some of them ever existed at all. A fastidious barman called Perfect Ed, […]
Winner of the 2025 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Craig Morgan Teicher “Asha Futterman’s debut, Song of Gray, is a book of devastating insight and clarity, and introduces a vital new poet. America’s inexhaustible racism is one urgent muse: in sharp, staccato lyrics that leap easily back and forth across the lines of logic, […]
Geography has never been so disastrously flexible. The geography of the world, while the literal, physical manifestations of it remain, are in flux as places and objects and structures and borders are in rearrangement. This instability, in the same way as an earthquake’s lingering impact can be seen in the bones of a building like a dry […]
Animal Fiero y Tierno (Fierce and Tender Animal), Ángela María Dávila Malavé’s first solo book of poetry, is twice dedicated. First is to the poet herself and asks: “‘aren’t you the loving one, who slowly seeks among the beasts the source of her lineage?’” (“‘no eres tú la amorosa que busca entre las bestias la […]