Instructive Fable for the Daughter I Don’t Have
Walk into the woods and keep walking.
Landscapes on a Train
Swensen’s poems, arranged on the page in windowlike, prose-shaped blocks, do what the best poems do: they carve holes in what would otherwise be opaque walls, mediating for her readers a view into spaces we would otherwise never see.
Illocality
Massey’s taut minimalism converts the things peopling these landscapes—trees, fog, parking lots, the feral subject matter one might expect to locate in a volume of status-quo ecology—into an investigation of emotional and philosophical import that tends more toward universality than locality.
Look
On the cover of Look is a copy of the first photograph ever taken, which charges the book with similar visual implications to tread carefully.
The Book of Joshua
Sympathetically surreal, funny and tragic, The Book of Joshua is an unusual book, and an unusually good one.
Dark Green
That’s the heartbreak that the poems in the collection can’t stop nibbling at. What if this is as good as it will ever get again? What then?
Time Down to Mind
For Graham Foust, the subject to which he has returned most often across the arc of his previous five volumes—coming back like bees circling though the hive has long vanished—is postmodern malaise, the quiet desperation of 21st-century suburban life and the scattered moments of authentic joy that sometimes, intermittently, charge that life with an emotional electricity it otherwise lacks.
Keys
The boy came to a clearing on the far side of the forest. An abandoned piano sat in the dead grass. It was out of tune, but that was fine—he hardly knew the difference. At first, he played some notes just to hear them, nothing in particular. But soon he found himself playing the curve […]
Deer Luck
1. One crow is good luck. Two crows, bad. Ladybug, ladybug: your house caught fire. One petal: he loves you. One petal: loves you not. Here is the body: stiff as a stick. Here is the feather: now you float. She’s looking sick: she’s dying, dead. One petal left: you’re dying, you’re dead. One crow: […]
From “Human Knowledge”
All around us, society is being used to tell itself a story. Know what it doesn’t say? Doesn’t say precisely how this one brick got here, how it got to be part of this walkway, only one of its faces visible. Doesn’t say how this brick shines with wind. You’re beautiful. One thing I’m not […]