When They Come for You Photo by Thomas Millot Police came through with a loudspeaker and said everyone needed to be out by 9 a.m., or else face arrest. [This despite] a ruling by the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that was effectively sustained by the US Supreme Court in December declar[ing] that […]
Parable Photo by Enguerrand Blanchy One summer, two kookaburras mated on a power line, extinguishing light in a thousand homes. Stories say the female opened her wings and touched two wires. Closing the circuit. Making, of her body, a conductor. And his, attached to hers. Witnesses gaped at brilliant flashes, cacophony like drums. The birds, […]
At the end of his new book, Frank Bidart ridicules Hamlet for thinking “the rest is silence.” One wonders what the difference might have been had the young prince said “the rest will be silent,” and perhaps Bidart hears Hamlet’s final words as prophecy when, in fact, they speak in present tense. Prophecies are about […]
Organized into five breathtaking sections, Andrew Hemmert’s memoir-in-verse, Sawgrass Sky, dazzles me with its visceral coming-of-age tropes and bestial symbols. Hemmert does not hold back as he reveals the spiritual angst he endured as a child growing up in Florida—his descriptions of picturesque and at times macabre landscapes intersect with painstaking reflections on childhood. In […]
Despite our socially conscious effort to illuminate the exploitative nature of the diamond trade in economically underdeveloped countries, diamonds, as a symbol and a commodity, are not something that we as a society can easily ignore, much less diminish. Ideas of luxury, status, and celebratory occasions immediately come to mind when one thinks of diamonds, […]
Takako Arai’s Factory Girls is a protest book, whose patchwork of poems and narrative voices weave together the story of what it means to grow up in a world pursued by the specter of industry and the ghost of production. These, for Arai, are egregious masculine entities that take over and threaten all of us […]
The first thing Gary Jackson does in origin story is confide in us. Some poems in this book, he says in an introductory note, are based off taped interviews with his mother, poems whose titles all start “Interview with. . .” He shares how he gathered the conversations, then manipulated them to remove some of […]
Sometimes as a reader of poetry, I can hear and feel a poem’s music and depth but fail to “grok” its full meaning. Alas, at these times how I wish poets delivered context, perhaps a footnote with a map of clues. Chris Haven’s debut poetry collection, Bone Seeker, denies my lazy desires. Haven’s poems ask […]
On a fundamental level, Wendy Xu’s The Past depicts the author’s dexterous mind in action as it grapples with the slippages, difficulties, and stark unknowability of the past. Xu’s poems depict the past—the book’s ever-present subject—as a semi-tangible object, markedly vexed by presence and absence. The past, for Wendy Xu, never makes itself fully present […]
Heard-Hoard by Atsuro Riley (2021) University of Chicago Press The title alone of Atsuro Riley’s new book can nudge awake our underground faith that the truest etymology reveals unexpected words as cognate: Heard-Hoard. As “whole” is to “holy,” as “word” is to “world,” as “think” is to “thank,” so “heard” might be to “hoard”—facets of […]