Extra Hidden Life, among the Days
Hillman plays with the post-human—a hypothetical, ecological state following the extinction of humanity—but never abandons political activism and poetic optimism.
Hillman plays with the post-human—a hypothetical, ecological state following the extinction of humanity—but never abandons political activism and poetic optimism.
There is magic in the poetry of Rocket Fantastic. Bodies are gendered and more-than-gendered. Humans are also creatures, most often a buck or a doe, who live and play amid other creatures of the wild.
Minnis notes that the “book was inspired by classic movies and couldn’t have been written without the Turner Classic Movie channel,” and the book indeed sounds more like a classic movie, specifically classic film noir, than any book of poetry I can think of.
In many ways, this is a nostalgic book—looking back and recalling old friends and scenes from childhood—but when Chambers hits the note he’s reaching for, readers are left in awe. In “Pin,” a poem in which the speaker reflects on the year his sister broke her arm, the piece ends with the two siblings dressed up
Even at the level of syntax, words and concepts flow into one another. The poems are fluid and absorptive.
In the precision and beauty of its varied form, Timothy O’Keefe’s You Are the Phenomenology is, among other things, a triumph of confinement.
Only a few pages in, it’s clear that this is not what one could reasonably expect from Coach House—or, for that matter, from any broadly conceived constellation of contemporary experimental poetry.
Moseley does not just consider the boundary between outside and inside. Her poems also explore divisions between dream life and reality, animals and humans, belief and doubt, bizarre encounters and everyday events.
A crucial component of the book’s success involves the meticulous balance Deming constructs between disarray and order, which holds a mirror to the goings-on of the world: yes, the headlines are clear, but how did we get here?
It’s like hearing out your friend who needs to tell you about that ex who cascades across his or her memory, about how the sky disintegrates the longer you stare at it, and how one’s relation to truth can only be measured by their proximity to pain.