While Beautiful Soul’s oscillation between fiction and metafiction can seem somewhat slow footed, the rich sonic textures of The Barons produces a dynamic friction that simultaneously accompanies the poems’ semantic content.
Listen to our podcast of this poem here. Friends, countrymen, one of these men is lying and though we care for one another, we’ll never agree about which one it is. The smile of lying and the smile of catching another in a lie are identical smiles. Friends, countrymen. Let us turn to the […]
Around a bend, and light that erases such failure. As a kid, in a desert full of fragile soils and beauty buckled and spired, full of hoodoo-tent-rock, space that could have drowned us. And the lakes cast pink, dowsing for the ley lines in blueberry bush and frost dune and there’s something I want to […]
Growth of trees is measured against the red shed, loud edifice now clear of old hay and dung, though still cluttered with rolls of fencing wire extracted and collated from the block, and tools for keeping the grass down, and paraphernalia for running the pump, and the air pump itself, its hoses reaching out under […]
I peer into the towel casket, reach unfurred hand to rusted red crown, down the unknotted spine I imagine being crushed by the crescendo car wheeling murder towards it. I lift the eyes, now my eyes, I don’t want, look the spine in its bruised and knuckly face. Spine, I ask, whatever species in you […]
Impressive in their range and arresting in their musicality, the poems are consistently successful.
While Weir’s poems are full of loss and dissolution, they also insist on a presence charged by both the pleasure and the fear inherent in seeing one thing as another, in metaphor. While many readers will wonder to whom or what the book’s title is addressed, perhaps the simplest way to read Weir’s title is also the most apt: this is a book that both laments an absence of pleasure in imagination and renews it.
Throughout the collection, Xu’s speakers use non sequitur to test the limits of absurdity and sometimes the reader’s patience. Yet when Xu hits that sweet spot where randomness mixes with emotion, the poems really shine.
Ethel Rackin’s The Forever Notes consists of three sections, “Notes,” “Pictures,” and “Songs,” all of which focus, stylistically and/or thematically, on the notion of activity within containment. The nineteen poems in “Notes” primarily address active containment stylistically, specifically utilizing un-capitalized titles, brevity, and repetition to striking effect.
One of the most striking features is Van Landingham’s ability to collapse massive distances within a few lines…