Whatever inspired that first live cell to pull a little line down the center and so become, as two, both and neither, it must have known what a child knows when he looks up at a house on fire, until, ascending, the night is day again. When I was his age, I put my ear […]
He only likes to build it. He doesn’t live Where he swims, where the city has pieces, He means to mend them, to tear the city Pieces where it can be mended. Here At my desk, I engage in a crisis among us. What I’m doing is with my development. What I’m doing these days […]
PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry 2017 Utah Book Award for poetry 2016 Poets and Writers Top Debut Poets 2015 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award NACCS-Tejas Foco Best Poetry Book of 2015 Ninth in the Mountain West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind & Donald Revell From undocumented men named Angel, to angels falling […]
Both Bashaw and Smith are important, though under-appreciated, poets…both complicate and enliven our understanding of the increasingly dire relationship between poetry and, since poetry too is a breathing thing, the habitat in which it lives.
What are we paying in moral capital, Roderick wants to know, for an easy life in the suburbs? And most troubling, what if we have—or he has—willingly exchanged morality for comfort?
I have called the book a poetic treatise, but in effect, it is more an inquiry into our particular hearts; to me, that is the essential function of poetry.
These are frightening, moving, deeply human poems—poems such as these are sorely needed.
With that in mind, McCrae’s Forgiveness Forgiveness is a highly accomplished and moving collection of poetry. This is a stunning follow up to an already accomplished body of work.
Being made aware of the body is absolutely crucial to Conrad’s praxis, as he calls it, because this is where our memory resides.
Gallaher is a master of moving from punchlines to moments of real gravity. Cultural references abound in the book, and I could have chosen any one of them as an example. Gallaher’s book is about so many things that his axiom about life in general—“We decide with our attention what has meaning / and what doesn’t”—applies to his book as well.