Against a poetic landscape filled with ironic detachment, Aaron McCollough’s work is refreshingly earnest. No Grave Can Hold My Body Down, his third collection from Ahsahta Press, finds the poet unabashedly working through issues of faith and belief, framed within the context of the Christian tradition.
Robert Fernandez’s ambitious debut, We Are Pharaoh, asks its reader to begin at the “billowing page,” a blank space of “intersecting possibilities.” The conjured image is a sort of endless paper sea, each line a current of images intended to flood our sensibilities—“the flesh calls back its bulls, the divers arrange themselves, occur as gods (loa) occur, that is, pliant: beds of mushrooms (pendentives) intersected by light.”
“At this point I think you might want to sit down, pour yourselves a drink, and fasten your seat belts in preparation for what I am about to divulge,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright in his new collection of poems called Kindertotentwald.
“At this point I think you might want to sit down, pour yourselves a drink, and fasten your seat belts in preparation for what I am about to divulge,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright in his new collection of poems called Kindertotentwald.
[hear the author read this piece by clicking this link.] A verb may well conceal a noun. A noun may conceal a fiddler beetle. A beetle may conceal an agnostic. An agnostic may conceal a shepherd’s pie. A shepherd may conceal your mother-in-law. Your mother-in-law may conceal a can of pineapple rings. Or she […]
[hear the author read this piece by clicking this link.] He doesn’t know you anymore. The hillside nursing home took his name. Scattered over the valley’s rooftops, it glitters off asphalt shingles in the heat. You’re here, in the hallway, too singular to grasp this dispersal. It won’t stop lapping over the lip of […]
Halfway through Roseate, Points of Gold, Laynie Browne appears to offer the key to decoding her often confounding ninth book of poems: “Attempts to record are ephemeral markings.” Browne’s prosody is appropriate to the textual layout of the collection: centered vignettes, whispers of ink against white space. Browne’s linguistic ancestry includes the physical motion poems […]
In Northerners, his second collection and winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize in Poetry from Western Michigan University, Seth Abramson evokes and amalgamates these images while simultaneously composing poems that glow with immediate warmth, poems whose emotional language often complicates and occasionally contradicts outright the private worlds it creates.
Compendium means a concise treatment of a vast subject, and this small volume (six inches by four inches, the size of a postcard) from Kristina Marie Darling is aptly named.
Featured poetry from the Fall/Winter 2011 issue.