…the kind of love continually appearing in Stone’s Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, is the kind of love that will be lived with for years, that will be analyzed and exploded,and breathlessly evaded only to be breathlessly clutched at too tightly.
Winner of the 2015 Utah Book Award for Poetry Seventh in the Mountain West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind & Donald Revell Clouds, Mountains, Birds, Different Ways of Speaking. Things That Matter, and Things That Do Not Matter. Things Found in a Local Grocery Store. Things Found in The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. […]
Before getting too deep into Mortar, Sara Mumolo’s first poetry collection, you run into a familiar yet disarming question: what am I doing here?
Clark Coolidge is no stranger to crystalline poetic forms. But sonnets? Such a traditional structure for an experimental jazz-influenced writer to take on. Then again, jazz is known for transforming standards in unpredictably meaningful ways, and this is not Coolidge’s first experiment with the sonnet. There is also the aleatory Bond Sonnets, published in 1965. […]
Those who like to think of poetry as the purest expression of a unified self, in the tradition of lyric, should prepare to have their world upended by Karla Kelsey’s A Conjoined Book.
The Next Monsters is an accomplished volume, one that’s as carefully crafted as it is culturally astute. Her new collection is a wonderful addition to an already thought-provoking body of work.
Noel’s unwavering awareness is so keen and rapt that as it perceives it also exerts pressure on its object, and the image that returns to the gazer arrives metamorphosed. Just as metamorphic rock presents a record of its own creation, existence, and reinvention, Noel’s images and phrases come to us intensely acted upon, but elementally unharmed…
Loving engenders intimacy. The resulting proximity creates space for further loving. Lynn Xu’s song is born out of this space of intimacy.
Driven more by a simmering undercurrent of topic than form or principle of organization, these poems are frankly endearing in their fidelity to the lyric as an able expression of complex truths.
Flower-bordered river where I fillet the hyacinths, a russian doll of places posing as one place. Halogen me at a horse show in Florida while another juliennes olives for appetizers. A doll slipped in another till all dolls are dull: versions of me with whistles for lips reciting asterisks in the periodic table. Collage of […]