The casual can seem lax: as praise, “casual” can sound like a euphemism for “underdressed,” “unformed,” or, “unannounced.” If you prefer announcement, form, and dress, you might wish to toss out all the poetry books celebrated for their tossed-off style: if a blurb mentions O’Hara, Notley, or Spicer, or praises the poet’s elevation of the […]
Brimming with characters, the poems are not narrative but tightly sprung lyrics whose wording reveals by doubling meaning and by doubling back to correct or redirect what’s been declared.
Her pacing is subdued and infectious, and it will get under your skin. These poems’ peculiar energy becomes most apparent when they are read aloud.
Browne’s challenge to how our world is and whether we should continue to stay in it. The political tone in Scorpyn Odes doesn’t explicitly address any one contemporary event.
Many of his poems don’t just push boundaries of time, place, race, and self, but seem to simply blow past them through their breadth of vision and striking diction.
Vap layers and links words and contexts, highlighting how we are ultimately bound by the language we use to communicate our experience.
Reading these poems is to be gripped by the uncanny: they’re strange and familiar.
Enchanted and incantatory, the poems of Certain Magical Acts resist convention and protocol, as Notley’s poems are wont to do, and they allow both poet and reader to not only create a new world but to occupy it together . . .
These poems are spring-loaded: by turns quirky, tough, and always clear-sighted.
Brutal seasons, natural disasters, plagues, class conflicts, and wars torment isolated survivors. What will come after all this destruction, symbolized by the front cover’s depiction of a collapsing tower?