Michael Farrell’s 2015 collection, Cocky’s Joy, is ambidextrous, its right hand painting comic tableaux, and its left rendering cool judgments. Farrell is often described as one of Australia’s leading experimental poets. “Experimental” in American work has recently tended toward the conceptual, polemical, and grotesque. Farrell’s experiment is one in bluff intelligence and sparkling, offhand wit. […]
In Martha Silano’s stunning fourth collection of poems, readers will encounter “velvety soup,” “60,000 eggs,” and “the big bang,” the end result being poems that are as wildly imaginative as they are diverse in their subject matter.
The possibilities [Johnston] envisions for our contemporary times are far more than we deserve.
If you want a taste of the beauty of our clumsy human limitations and desires, cut through with the clean freedom of the nothingness from which all things spring, you will be richly rewarded in this collection, and may find yourself meditating on it as you would on an ancient text.
Ostensibly a catalog of Ohio’s network of railroads,Ohio Railroads takes up race, memory, language, and a history that includes the Wright Brothers, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Roswell, and every American war.
Kristin Hatch’s poems in The Meatgirl Whatever are following the idea of “to serve.” Or more appropriately, the assumption that “necessary” is a part of “to serve.” Like that’s where a lyric honoring the service industry would start. It’s necessary to serve!
Testament is…bound up in fluid and scenic meditations on the nature of writing, and how this process infiltrates, informs, or overrides reality, time, identity and history.
Yes, these are poems of belief and faith, of hope, and they reach toward those emotions through a careful unpeeling of older poetic adages
for my wife, nalani, and our 6-month-old daughter, kaikainali’i, hawai’i 2014 [we] take kaikainali’i to the pediatrician— outbreak of enterovirus D68 in new york— the nurse recites the vaccines and expiration dates— outbreak of chikungunya in the caribbean florida, tokelau— nalani holds kaikainali’i and sings a mele [we] learned during hapai class at kokua kalihi […]
The Three Bridges on Ohio River between East Liverpool and Steubenville, Ohio Don’t worry, I promise, it won’t last long. They take one leg, then the other, and hold you on the table until their job is done. I wouldn’t lie, it hurts, the way they pry you open with their needles and crooks, […]