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 […]

In Sarah Mangold’s bold fourth collection, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners, the definition of “woman’s work” changes. Highlighting the contributions of both taxidermist and naturalist Martha Maxwell and Delia Akeley, the wife of “the father of modern taxidermy,” Mangold examines the perception of women who existed in and made significant advances in a male-dominated […]

Kasey Jueds’s second collection, The Thicket, has intersecting emotional and imagistic arcs that reward the careful reader with complex realizations that refuse closure. Two questions are skeleton keys that allow the speaker—and the reader—to unlock metaphorical gates of self-awareness: “where am I?” and “where does one thing become another?” Jueds said these questions are the […]

Throughout his second poetry collection, Christopher Kempf reckons with the schisms at the root of American identity and history, from the Civil War to modern-day mundanities like a “BEACH PARTY STEAK FRY”—as one poem is titled—and a high school homecoming game. In “Homecoming,” Kempf observes the quotidian accumulate to something ultimately as significant national identity: […]