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…
As a whole, Kornberg-Weiss’s impulse is to emphasize the relation of one’s purview of histories past and possible with the present moment.
This collection shows us how the poem’s purpose isn’t to contain or reflect or make sense of the world, but to be the edge that the world spills over.
Morrison’s Beyond the Chainlink is a beautifully written collection, as philosophical as it is concrete and carefully grounded. A lovely addition to this writer’s already accomplished body of work.
Ascension Theory, Christopher Bolin’s debut collection, is a negotiation between the poetics of knowing and unknowing.
Ultimately, how we stand, how we inhabit space and what we touch in this realm become Ronk’s preoccupations—with the final caveat that doing so is merely temporary.
Bartone reveals the contemporary prose poem as inextricable from haiku, haibun, and the spare, image-driven lyrics of the early Modernists.