Dave Brinks started writing these poems in December 2004, less than a year before Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, yet the arrival and aftermath of the flood are utterly absorbed in his cycle, his form vast enough to comprehend that great calamity.

Among the hundreds of poets publishing each year, some are most at ease in the Zen master’s or rabbi’s chair, slyly considering and distilling a fresh urban folklore, suitable to the twenty-first century, or offering hymns of praise or comfort in grief.

Michele Glazer’s new collection, On Tact, & the Made Up World, finds the author experimenting with a more sentimental mode, moving out of the strange and intuitive observations in her previous work and into a voice that seems to be less trustful of language, less precise in its vision, and more engaged with the subtle opacities of communication.

Surviving the arctic winter, dealing with a relationship pulling apart, and living in an Inupiat community that is struggling to maintain its identity are the themes that intersect in Kelsea Habecker’s Hollow Out.

Eschaton by Michael Heller, published by Talisman House, is a collection of largely philosophically discursive poems, many of which are, perhaps, rendered in too much of a conversational tone for a thorough appreciation of them.

Maxine Chernoff asks an important question in her introduction to the Slope Editions Book Prize winner Anamnesis: “What response will the reader have to this malady of words and their impermanence?”

Despite the growing popularity of shows such as A&E’s Intervention, which seem to have the best intentions at heart for their subjects despite their melodramatic production values, addiction remains a pervasive taboo for most Americans. (That is, of course, unless you are discussing Lindsay Lohan’s latest exploits with your BFF over lattes.) In our milieu […]