“My mother is Black / under the eyes in / twilight,” Tatiana Johnson-Boria writes in “Portrait of a Mother Before Sunrise,” a poem from her skillfully haunting debut poetry collection, Nocturne in Joy. “How many / nights does she wait / for morning to yawn / into waking?” the speaker asks, exemplifying Johnson-Boria’s deft enjambment […]
Jesse Lee Kercheval’s poetry in I Want to Tell You works toward a language of matrilineage, environmentalism, and war. Any of these aspects would be an admirable and daunting task individually, however, interweaving their conflicts and constraints into singular poems yields a haunting landscape of grief frozen over. For instance, Kercheval’s poem “Say the word […]
In Ishmael Mask, Charles Kell’s second collection of poetry, the poet extends his exploration of identity associated with substance abuse, survivor’s guilt, and male friendships from his first collection, Cage of Lit Glass (Autumn House Press, 2019), which I reviewed in conversation with Nicholas Hauck for The Maynard in December 2019. While the themes from […]
In Thirst & Surfeit, Elizabeth Robinson pressurizes language’s relationship to time, to history. In her hands, a sentence becomes an archeological wonder warping the supposed linear constraints of thinking. Here, time speaks as a guide and companion. What does it guide us towards? Itself. These poems think the thinking of time’s unfolding by uncovering history […]
Hafiz’s Little Book of Life (Translated by Gary Gach and Erfan Mojib), Hampton Roads Publishing (2023) Spring can make me want poems whose pleasure comes as quick and unexpected as the purple burst of a crocus. Luckily for me, a new translation of Hafiz, Hafiz’s Little Book of Life, has been at hand for many months, […]
Norman Finkelstein’s Further Adventures is the last of a trilogy of collections centered around Pascal Wanderlust, a “strange, androgynous protagonist” whose “fate is bound to the Immanent Foundation.” We begin with the “Prologue” and are first introduced to the Arch-Mage, who immediately situates us in world of hierarchies and roles: The Arch-Mage of Nonsense is […]
The titular Negro Mountain in C.S. Giscombe’s latest collection is, foremost, a real place: a long ridge in the Allegheny Range of mountains, southwest Pennsylvania, situated directly atop the Mason-Dixon Line. According to word-of-mouth histories that Giscombe includes in the book, Negro Mountain gained its name in the 1750s when a “gigantic African” died in […]
Flipping through a beautiful new collection of poetry to find that it is actually a collection of prose poems is a little daunting. I worry that it will require a kind of energy that I don’t usually tap into when reading verse poetry. But from the first, Mary Ruefle’s new collection, The Book, turns that […]
Raphael Block’s new collection, The Dreams We Share, is a work of sustained and reverent attention to the natural world. The poet’s fifth book, it contains eighty-nine poems in five sections, and names over a hundred different plants and nearly as many species of birds, animals, and insects. This abundance might suggest the volume reads […]
Diane Mehta’s Tiny Extravaganzas is an exploration of muses and isolation, and with references to Milton, Dante, and Whitman, her imagistic poems push language and forms to their extremes. Uniting the poems and creating a deep sense of fluidity is the inherent focus on the role art plays in living and existing in a world […]