Considering the weightiness of the subject matter—identity, love, language, and the limits of understanding—this collection is impressively and tidily organized, divided into three sections of roughly equal length. The poems are short but philosophically potent. With only one exception, the poems all fit on a single page.
Throughout his new poems, Levine operates as a poetic pantheist, locating vitality in the ordinary and “extraordinary” alike.
The most important thing about these edits is that the old words are not simply erased or supplanted by new words. The marks keep the original terms in view, even as they significantly qualify them.
There are so many angles to loss, and as the speaker’s voice bellows in this collection, McKibbens reveals the complexity of pain—even when its face is anger.
Images are repeated and inverted; sentences flip syntax along with their corresponding sounds. All this builds into a dense brick of repeated words so tightly woven that it appears a singular object.
I approach a new book by Yau as I do a new film by my favorite auteur director: I don’t watch the preview, I just crave more evidence of the artist’s mind at work.
Charting this particular topography of the down-and-out, Freure picks up the flip side of success and examines it through the specific locality of Montreal.
The arc of the book is one spent living in and thinking about mountains where the landscape is mapped in drawings, traced through walks, experienced through pain, defined in books, and remembered with past companions—human and animal.
What I call my good intentions get the best of me. / During week two of the semester I have students // place an asterisk each time shame shows up / in the excerpt of a memoir whose author’s take // on affirmative action & bilingualism I take for / internalized whitewashing.
I elegy. This bright morning unsayable / as the sentence of the woman who died / in daylight as her children climbed her still / body in a hospital bed.