Photo by Theo Crazzolara Girl A, always Girl A, dives headlong into her own skin as she steps into a vehicle of light, skin rushing to catch up, closing enclosing her, in within the steps the box she carves out the vertical column of space that is hers, shadow edging close into the vertical column […]
Photo by Stephen Kruso In summer, its trees blaze with color, their fingers spilling over the tenants. There is a smoker, our fixture, his cough a deep chime. One, two. His second-floor watch is consistent but punctuated. There are children, creatures of the afternoon, DayGlo bicycles lurching forward with half-flat white tires. Sometimes, I come […]
Ratcliffe’s words carry in them the promise that, somewhere in this sustained observation, there is an inroad to knowing.
Ancient stories of transformation are again transformed by Rekdal’s telling, and it’s impossible to read their contemporized violence without the lens the #metoo movement has given us. For Rekdal, transformation is not simply progression, but fragmentation, and Nightingale stays honest to this truth.
Winner of the 2019 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Kazim Ali A magnifier praises what’s larger and a magnifier concentrates poisons. Brandon Krieg’s Magnifier is a book of spirits invoked by destroyers. It trains its gaze on the deep dependencies we are urged daily to hide from ourselves and interrogates the ways we insulate […]
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.