Jun, 17 2020 | no responses
The book’s title, the Buddhist circle, is shaped by the first and last poems which echo one another, asserting selfhood and agency: “Devotion” ends with “this token / I held back for myself” while the title poem concludes “in the contours of hand-drawn waves / you start to pull your own story.”
Jun, 17 2020 | no responses
Despite being caught in the eddies of loss, returning in memory and emotion to past personal or collective horrors like domestic abuse, a bloody battleground’s dead, or a lost pregnancy, we can move forward.
May, 19 2020 | no responses
The strength of these impossible-to-summarize poems and the disorder of any narrative is in the invitation they extend to the reader to step out of the demands of the moment to enjoin in conversation for a while.
May, 14 2020 | no responses
The collection is wonderfully complex in its work towards uncovering un-simplified truths within the near-constant framework of landscape and colonialism: “fantasies of Spanish stucco and red tile nod to / European slaughter over transsubstantive mysteries.”
Almonds are Members of the Peach Family
May, 13 2020 | no responses
Leading by example, Sauer shows that not only can our stories can be messy, hard to pin down, transcendent, painful, healing, and provoking—the form in which we tell them can be too.
May, 01 2020 | no responses
Kathleen Graber’s The River Twice troubles the distinction between past and present. Rather than eschew the idea of time altogether, Graber’s collection reimagines time—perhaps as a cyclical rather than linear motion, but more likely as an all-encompassing surrounding material, like air or water.