With a wry humor that softens reality’s hard edges, the poems in Jenny L. Davis’s Trickster Academy highlight how Indigenous people have become experts in the sorrows with which white oppression has left them. The collection explores the meaning of being Native in academia, and to do so it presents elements most readers fail to […]
The poems in Prelude by Brynne Rebele-Henry strike like lightening on the night sky, with imagery so spare and halting that my own imaginings stunned me to inner silence as my pencil starred passage after passage while I read, marking many worthy lines. This poetry collection comprises the imagined exploration of gay female sexual experience […]
The suffering and displacement of refugees from the brutal Syrian civil war are given agency through the poems of Jazra Khaleed. The Light That Burns Us is the first collection of Khaleed’s poetry translated into English. The poet situates himself as the refugee,¹ the immigrant, the one who has nothing. The nobody, the Other. While […]
When circumstances change, we change. As with any organism, a human’s survival is predicated on homeostasis, the processes of self-regulating stabilization. In addition to our physiological adjustments, we must also adapt psychologically to altered conditions. Some changes create extraordinary imbalance: the death of a loved one, a debilitating accident, the loss of one’s homeland. Exiled […]
Erin Rodoni’s And If the Woods Carry You shimmers with a mythos equal parts wondrous and perilous. The woods these poems wander teem with not only elves and mythic white deer but also with monsters, some of them wearing human faces. Like most fairytales, this collection has the power to enchant readers with its beauty […]
One of the very few facts that should keep artists inspired to make more art is that the present moment is always the point in history with the most art made. One stands on Westminster Bridge and, looking at Big Ben, overhears a couple planning to film a mukbang. Turning to see who they are […]
There is a call to approach the remote corners of the world and know, for a moment, a stillness and quietude, a form of nothing that seems to resonate as a form of living. Susan Tichy’s North | Rock | Edge is a slow embrace of such isolation, a refreshment for my readerly self during […]
In the prose poems that comprise Lee Young-Ju’s collection Cold Candies, the physical world is porous and distorted. Similarly, the human body lacks solidity, with body parts morphing to new locations or disappearing altogether. The self is both present and absent. The poet is full of words and at a loss. Yet, while Jae Kim’s […]
Martha Ronk’s A Myth of Ariadne examines our contemporary apathy toward war, casual violence, and one another by engaging with De Chirico’s proto-surreal painting series depicting the Cretan princess Ariadne. The poems provide a window into Ariadne’s inner life as she endures an endless, semi-conscious marble sleep. Her gauzy stone entrapment is our own. The […]
I finished John Sibley Williams’s Scale Model of a Country at Dawn on a beautiful January afternoon in Oregon. I had already taught a class on Zoom, been out for a cup of coffee, and checked in on the news during lunch. Such an American day in these times, tranquil enough and easy. But the […]