Post-
Miller’s task is to remove the fixed barrier that has separated public from private and past from present while exploring the topics of debt, violence, and family.
Live from the Scene
It’s not so bad once you get used to it—
August’s algal bloom on the farm’s
manure lagoon
Japan
photo by Jeff Clover Dear Japan, Dear Ambient Author, Dear Oh, Dear Trans- figuration Boy, Dear Chemical Girl, Dear Fiber of My Fire, Dear Big Red Scarf, Dear Halloween Buoy, Desire and lists. The idea of me—that hash-marked outline that universally precedes me by mere moments—writes this to you. I trust it to say everything […]
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.