Change is inevitable and Sengupta himself sets out as a wandering minstrel to bring out the inner psyche within the poetic canvas. His poems, vibrant with an insatiable zest for life, give readers a healing touch, silence plays the flute, and readers plunge into “solitary stillness” where poetry pervades.
There is no doubt that these poems are brutal—harsh in their insistence on wanting to document what happens on the other side of an abusive relationship. By channeling the voices of so many other “hysterical” poets, Skaja shows the resilience and power in confessing the past.
If the act of writing is one of discovery, then in a similar way, these poems act like a compass, tracking north, west, sometimes sideways, and even underwater.
In this beautiful poem, almost a personal creed, Lewis brings together science, nature, and our own consciousness. Who are we when “twenty questions” or a thousand bring no definitive answers?
But again, the underlying sense of the collective is layered in as well: we are all “inside, in the factory, the universe, the one that breathes for you.”
Language is always an essential agent in the construction of imagined war scenarios and political realities. But the poem asks the question differently, from the other side, as it were: What if language was introduced into the war scenario to make it more realistic, more believable?
What sprouts from his burned bracts is the realization that the environmental disaster we have wrought is erasing the line between Earth and body, atmosphere and mind. It’s in our synapses. It’s in our nostrils. It comes on foot because we are its feet.
This quietly devastating “book of friendship,” as the text is subtitled, both flies and lives in the body as Ruhl and Ritvo talk about soup, the afterlife, chemotherapy, and poems—all within breaths and pages of one another. If you already love Ritvo’s poetry, as I do, this book lends a new degree of intimacy and a greater perspective on the aesthetic metaphysics at work in his poems.
In this compact yet expansive collection of poems, Laura Read places herself on a chair across from inhabitants of her past and present. She has risen to the occasion to reflect lyrically and with kindness upon the shadows that have hovered over her, shadows thrown by little boxes of stories and place that continue to impact her adulthood as a woman, wife, mother, poet and teacher.
What’s more, Brown’s development of the “duplex”—a sonnet-like repetitive form, whose name recalls apartment-style housing—showcases an adept talent for eloquent lyricism. Perhaps what sets it apart, however, is Brown’s penchant for optimism, rooted in an appraisal of physicality and the beauty of particulars.