Tobias Wray’s debut poetry collection, No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man, adapts its title from mathematician Alan Turing’s 1952 letter written just before pleading guilty to “homosexual acts” which were still punishable by imprisonment or chemical castration at the time (and were only decriminalized in 1967—amended in the year 2000 to be equivalent […]
Muriel Leung’s powerful second book is divided into seven parts, each of which are formally and thematically distinct from one another, but which, like a swarm, share the same directionality, hunger, and capacity for flight. And, in fact, each section might be read as an experimental investigation of how different genres can engage variously with […]
Daniel Tiffany’s new book wears a sandpaper shirt, the title marked in black crayon, smeared. The stanzas on the page look like a row of lying-down Christmas trees waiting to get burned. During my first reading, at about page thirty-four, I was elsewhere, stopping to say, “I’m in a grotto!” because for me the dwelling […]
The thing about dad jokes is that they’re not for you; they’re for your father. They’re chances for him to let off some steam; to not seem so harsh after he keeps telling you, “No, for the hundredth time, you cannot have ice cream for breakfast”; to show off the wordplay he usually keeps to […]
MPH and Other Road Poems by Ed Roberson (2021) Verge Books There’s a line Emerson writes in “The Poet” that has, for thirty some years now, struck me as a kind of truth: “For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not […]
These poems imbued with issues of climate and racial justice bristle with sound, word play, the everyday and the exotic, and numerous moments of beauty.
Akbar invites his audience to read between the lines and find his shadow story—the truth he doesn’t share outright, but that unveils itself with each page turn.
From his perch of eyewitness, Lynch presents to the literary canon his deeply considered treatise on the meaning of life in all of its mystery and death in its inevitability.
I stamp my foot in applause, write notes on the pages, distribute my thoughts; Swensen makes of “viewing” a muscular verb.
I wasn’t raised to trust or believe in chance. I was raised to believe nothing happened except by merit of the effort one put into the task at hand, the work one consciously and deliberately put toward a goal. And with enough work, one got what they had justly earned. Chance had no place in […]