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.
It is a connection both chilling and intimate, when the speaker of these poems acknowledges being watched—as if to say, “I know you’re still here.”
Each collection firmly recites a laundry list of damages done to the body, as well as how the body has found the means to bounce back from the world’s tendency to wear down the self.
Bond is particularly adept in his ability to establish accessibility with a poem then, segueing toward phrasing that upends the predictability of linear and associative language, in this way he enrolls the reader and subsequently destabilizes the text (and reader).
If his poems lampoon the culture of small-town America, Schoonebeek also writes with a genuine awareness of their grievances and the historical conditions which produced them.
Kornfeld and Massimilla want to be as thorough as possible with each recipe, including cultural and historical context along with poetic relevance for even the simplest of recipes, such as the aromatic and complex flavors found in a cup of dirty chai.
All these collections, however, share an intellectual restlessness, a capacity for rendering the associative leaps and gambols of thought in skillful poetic language, and a keen investigative spirit which—playfully, pleasurably—unfolds itself across the many diverse forms each collection takes up.
Resisting single interpretation and clear narrative, John Amen pushes against the conventional through poems that take part in multiplicity.