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 […]
Christopher Salerno’s The Man Grave is an exercise in duality—in studying the double-edged sword of masculinity within one’s self and the desire to become more vulnerable and soft in a culture of bravado and violence. The collection’s opening poem, “Headfirst,” establishes this immediately when the speaker is a victim of a hit and run. The […]
Finalist, 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry Finalist, 2022 Foreword INDIES for Poetry Finalist, 2022 Golden Poppy Award for Poetry Finalist, 2022 San Francisco/Nomadic Literary Award for Poetry Twentieth in the Mountain/West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind, Kazim Ali, Dan Beachy-Quick, Camille T. Dungy & Donald Revell Drawing inspiration from the life […]
In Trisha Brown’s Glacial Decoy, the performance that lends its title to Luke Roberts’s new book, Glacial Decoys, a group of five female dancers wearing long, pleated white dresses spin, slide, and shoulder their way across the stage, moving against a backdrop of projected black-and-white photographs that change at regular intervals. The dance unfolds in […]
David J.S. Pickering’s latest collection begins with a poem about feeling both at home and on edge in Eastern Oregon. It is a place where the editor of the local newspaper professes his love for religion and the 2nd Amendment, but not for the marriage that Pickering shares with his husband—or, as the poet says, […]