I. Before the invention of glass, time was not translucent. Mostly it kept to itself, bandaging the wounded, sleeping inside the minerals that formed below our restlessness. Sometimes a volcano spit out a fugitive star—it cooled into obsidian, a window we could neither repair nor see through. But its arrows taught us the meaning of […]
In The Final Take, Susko seeks to record something that puts to rest the aftereffects of having survived, making out of poetry a kind of prolepsis that fills the void of an apocalyptic delay. And so the poems trudge toward a horizon that rips across the skyline like a mass grave as the attempts at memorializing, at making things appear by keeping time, ultimately falter: “Then you disappeared, that is / what happens in wars.” Finally, it is disappearance itself that appears in the wake of these vanishings.
Evans’s A Penance, though not perfect, challenges readers in a way that requires them to continuously re-read the text in order to plunge the depths that he has constructed. This collection should be required reading for anybody interested in contemporary poetry, especially if a reader has become disillusioned by the overbearing “I” or the gilded forms of surface experimentalisms that grow dull after one reading.
There is a set of instructions one should follow before reading Sally Keith’s The Fact of the Matter. First, make a knot with your hands by wrapping your fingers around one another and gripping them tightly.
This poet is an interdisciplinary artist and the visual presentation of Listening for Earthquakes is as delightful as the content. Prose poems, formal verse, and free verse share the pages equally, as do experimental forms that stray from expectation.
In that layering of story and persona, these writers engage with the suppleness of female experience in ways that are not only formally and aesthetically engaging, but have an ethical potency that permits the agent of the poem to be many things at once: simultaneous.
Seaton’s project is a map which curves intricately, reflexively, and suddenly becomes a globe.
At turns beautiful and disconcerting, Grammar presents us with a thought-provoking portrayal of language as it is transfigured by our usage, offering readers a graceful matching of form and content all the while.
The poems of Lily Brown’s debut full-length collection risk utterances that make belief an appealing, if not necessary, episteme again.
If a poet’s work is words—the words that call forth the sun, that cause the sun—the poet’s work must be a site of divination, a place where the poem both creates and causes the world.