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.
Your plank boat on the bank / was replaced with dark leaves / in the shape of a boat.
Heaven enough, I said, but the door wouldn’t close. / The light kept coming, impenetrable light, / the light from just before a paradise
I will withdraw my pleasantries and boil / all your chickens which are purring now / behind my house
A necessary new translation of a book that looks deeply and astutely at the nonhuman world, recognizing the role such entities play in shaping the assemblage of beings which comprise an environment.
Along with tough images from someone facing the end of life, there are generosity and extravagance in Ritvo’s poems—a result of an imagination on overdrive.
These poems take careful note of the methods by which humans are destroying the Earth, as well as the ways in which the planet is fighting back.
Men, the poems argue, want a goddess to sleep with, but in doing so may create a mother, and that terrifies them.
Hickman often sets out to compose her poems with the kind of sobriety that a surgeon has to maintain during an operation.