O’Leary so brilliantly makes language itself a rhizomatic experience, a syntactical force that allows the reader to experience directionality and conjunction in the language as a consequence of the luminous simultaneity of the natural world. The tactile, concrete details and sensuous quality of the words combine to make a deeply strange sense out of a word-picture that’s fully worlded without being fully grounded. It’s astonishing.
Scanlon’s poems operate at the moment of enjambment between the last two lines above, the ostensible rejection of all the “bowing and beseeching” of the invisible world that turns out to be the heart’s fullest desire, albeit a private one.
Seventeenth in the Mountain West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind, Donald Revell & Kazim Ali 2020 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award in Poetry Winner “Jami Macarty’s poems draw us into the vagaries of human love, just as they implicate us in the ‘menagerie of the surviving world.’ These marvellously immersive poems of the Sonoran Desert […]
Daniel Poppick’s second collection, Fear of Description, features a collection of sonnets, elegies, and autobiographical essays that examine both a crisis of a generation and a crisis of the self. Through a careful examination of formal restrictions as a means of accessing truth, Poppick attempts to establish trust and beauty within language. In these tests […]
It presents a tension as well for the reader: if silence is total absence, an obliteration, how is “nothingness” described?
The collection begins with dramatic monologues and portraits, cinematic and enigmatic, that are more traditionally structured with left-justified lines and regular punctuation.
The mythological narrative works as a framework here because of its inherent mystery—the kind of unknowability that emerges over centuries—as well as its looming cultural influence, interweaving through the ways in which we understand ourselves and each other, even today.
The concept of a theory becomes a rich, generative shape with its own kind of ontology or weather. Even if there is a kind of danger and lack of clarity in the midst of blood and fog, there’s also a beauty to how it becomes self-sustaining.
Interiors and the fullness thereof feel at the heart of this book, a gorgeous kind of phenomenology that questions pronouns, desire, categories, queerness, and how a mind moves through the world as body. Or, rather, the body is the interface of the mind. The speakers of the poems of The Year of the Femme feel at once ghostly and embodied, interior and exterior found at the ecotone of dailiness, thistle, lipstick.
Strong images from the botanical, geological, mammalian, and environmental worlds sensuously create lines of emotional force in the poems.