The 1977 educational film Powers of Ten begins with an aerial view of a couple picnicking in the park—a strange perspective, as if we were giants. Over the next five minutes, the video zooms out at the rate of one power of ten every ten seconds. We see the park framing the picnic blanket, the […]
In Will Harris’s Brother Poem, the lines between reality and dreamscapes blur, and readers dwell in the visages and myths an individual creates about oneself. Each poem hangs like its own word cloud in a vast, verse-filled sky. Deeply sensitive and acutely self-aware, Brother Poem carefully dissects familial complexities, difficult relationships, and love and living’s […]
Midlife is a reckoning with our experience of time. The past seems impossibly far away. The future feels foreshortened. This phase of life demands that we take stock of who we are in the present and make peace or changes before we die. The 51 poems in David Groff’s haunting third collection, Live in Suspense, […]
Jackson Holbert’s debut collection, Winter Stranger, winner of the Milkweed Editions 2022 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, considers the surprises in grief and the unexpected reminders left by the dead for the bereft. The speaker, a young man negotiating his own demons and drug addiction, constantly apprehends signs of a presence: a beloved lost one, personified […]
A few years ago, thanks to the magic of the internet, I bought a copy of the 1969 Norton Edition of Ronald Johnson’s Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses. I probably paid too much for the state it’s in; it’s an ex-library edition, with browning pages, staples in it, stamps, etc., but the design exudes Johnson. […]
Set during the wider context of the global pandemic and within the personal history of the speaker’s grappling with cancer, Nancy Naomi Carlson’s Piano in the Dark looks at the latent danger within “everything in nature,” as in a startling untitled villanelle she dedicated to her late sister-in-law, Roxanne Miller: Everything in nature contains its […]
I likened this collection, after an initial reading, to a canvas by Kandinsky, where broad strokes of vivid color and delicate, lyrical passages are very often underscored by an unease, a kind of muted protest. It’s a combination which proves immediately effective, and which generates real admiration for a poet confident in her art—a poet […]
Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action by Jordan Dunn (2022) Partly Press The leaves in Fort Collins, following the season’s first snow, are far past peak color and mostly fallen, dry-brown, on the ground. It puts one in a pensive mood, walking the dog each morning, and three books—some finished a few days ago, another […]
Form and voice unite the lyrical menagerie of Chariot, Timothy Donnelly’s fourth collection of poetry. Each page offers newness, creating a self-contained experience, a capsule of insight or subversion; a poem in Chariot might reflect on the lived world versus portrayal on social media, or build from the scent of marigolds, a concept from philosophy, […]
Forgive me the spoiler, but L. J. Sysko’s debut poetry collection The Daughter of Man ends with the most comprehensive set of notes I have ever seen. These five pages of notes, so exhaustive they almost form a poem unto themselves, cover everything from an unlisted quote by Andy Warhol to S. E. Hinton’s novel […]