Throughout this collection, Syersak reconfigures and responds to art, philosophy, poetry, and history by directly addressing them. The “dear” of “dear architecture” that opens this collection represents the structure of address—what Syersak calls the “apostrophic pose”—that this book endeavors to build through matter and language.
In these poems, delicately and profusely braided together in a loose narrative of nine sections, Daneen Wardrop envisions medieval life in Venice and the Silk Road through the eyes of Marco Polo’s wife, Donata Badoer.
After having an impressive series of tests run on his body, Dickinson uses poetry as his laboratory notebook. The poems in Anatomic record data, suggest hypotheses, provide context for discoveries, and lay out the subject’s reflections.
Winner of the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by John Yau Selected by John Yau for the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, Gillian Cummings’s second book, gives voice to her version of Ophelia, a young woman shattered by unbearable losses, and questions what makes a mind unwind till […]
And while many of Meitner’s meditations are brutal and anxiety-laced, what’s also clear is this collection believes firmly in the power of goodness. The world is dangerous, but not all hope is lost: It can be immeasurably beautiful, too.
How indeed can we know any better than to pretend in our cultural discourse that the past is past, that sexual violence is over and done with for survivors? Eilbert offers an alternative, holding open the wound by concretizing the spaces left by trauma and the shape a telling makes around the traumatic act.
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