He seems afraid that the world has become inured to the sickeningly steady stream of murders: “You see human / interest piece, sunny & rounding out the evening news / where I see eclipsed casket.” In the face of such violence, remaining silent is not an option.
“Before I was a man I was a man / made of pixels,” Christopher Kempf writes in “Oregon Trail,” a poem early in his prize-winning debut. Like many in the collection, Kempf’s ode to the titular computer game is about coming of age in the Information Age, where writing entails virtual violence. . . .”
In her stunning new collection Cyclorama, Daneen Wardrop applies the unique artistic resources of poetry to the task of social history. Structured as an extended sequence of linked persona pieces, the work in this finely crafted volume eschews the great figures of the American Civil War to give voice to individuals who may otherwise have remained voiceless: wives, children, and the invisible labor that sustained an entire nation.
The shifting meaning, line by line and poem by poem, attests to McCrae’s excellent care of race and language. Through its poetics, perhaps McCrae’s book has something to teach us about nuance of thought in the face of divisive moments.
Bendall’s aesthetic of incompletion asserts that conventions of language make us incapable of seeing the world as anything other than extensions of ourselves, feelingly pointing to limits of that perspective. Dazzling and intuitive poetry may not save us, but many who face coming loss turn to language’s transformational illusion.
…reading through Joron’s volume is, à la Tanning’s painting, to confront one’s fundamental notions, linguistic and otherwise. From its first poem to its last, The Absolute Letter endeavors to sonically and euphonically elasticize the scope of the poetic form.
Overyellow describes itself as “a work about place —about the attempt to construct, through writing, the possibility of place in the external world . . . Pesquès’s interrogation of the mountain that dominates his landscape becomes an interrogation of language, of how it brings us the world and how it simultaneously denies us access to it.”
Meadow Slasher begins as a book about a vagrant with questionable motives and turns into a meditative book about an artist questioning his responsibility to edit. “Slasher” in Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s title refers both to “editor” and “criminal,” maybe the most violent among us.
As do lyric poems, the letters framing the book do double duty as the expressions of narrowly construed personae and as invitations to the reader:
Irwin’s book is full of fables—a talking cat who meets an ancient and growing mouse, three-inch-tall people who can only speak after eating grass—and they work wonderfully.