Incorporating a few of the poems and themes that appeared in his collection Night Logic, Matthew Gellman reprises his poems of loss, retrospection, and family in the deeply psychological collection Beforelight. In these tender poems of personal and familial exploration, readers find a speaker tuned to nature and keen on taking the fragile elements of […]
Dripping with water and blood, bursting with song and mourning, dancing with ancestral and future bones, To Be Named Something Else moved me in entirely new ways. Immediately, I proceeded to read it again. I needed to know how she did it. How did every poem grip me, tip me, thrill me, spill me? What […]
As I read Synthetic Jungle, the third full-length collection Michael Chang has published since 2021, I couldn’t help but contemplate the cattiest, most cutting thing that could be said about it. One of the pleasures of Synthetic Jungle is the gossipy, skeptical eye Chang trains on everything they observe, so a wry send-up seems like […]
Winner of the 2024 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Brenda Shaughnessy Nicholas Gulig’s third collection of poetry, The Other Altar, unearths a landscape where the experience of loss is both local and global, personal and political, here and far away. The speaker of these poems wanders in a world illumined at every turn by […]
Photo by Rene Böhmer on Unsplash One of us hears from her last week at a Crisis Prevention Meeting. One of us hears her speaking in Ainu. It isn’t Ainu we decide because it is also dying or dead by some reports. It must be pieces of many languages strung together with a syntax more […]
Photo by Yoksel Zok on Unsplash A daffodil. A blanket. A bike. A pink geode exploding with crystals. A pair of ducks paddling upstream. An oatmeal cookie made by a woman who has been making them for 70 years. A tender, young branch from an apple tree. A gift. An offering. A conch shell smooth […]
A forager once told me that an attempt is an illusion. Under the roof of a tent, lands become vast rooms of solitude, fluttering like the hanging man in the middle of the square. When I told my friend what the forager told me, he said that he’s bipolar and that an attempt is the […]
Photograph by Jon Flobrant I was dreaming of three forks in the river. Between us, there are eight names, so our daughter will have the longest name in history, the same name as this river. I have loved everyone with such an embarrassing grip, even through the night. When I woke I felt we had […]
In Juan Calzadilla’s The Roof of the Whale Poems, translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott, readers encounter an emotional landscape where one walks in a dreamlike state through urban and personal environments and revolutionary forefronts. The poems in this collection are not shy. They address personal discomfort, social displacement, and radical interpretation of […]
Claire DeVoogd’s debut collection of poetry is an exercise in weaving and reweaving, seaming and unseaming. Stitched together in tight fragments, her words punch through the past like bird shot through a tapestry. Then, DeVoogd pulls the loosened threads through and braids them into something new. The tapestry is both form and subject, and all […]