Hushed, Quadrophonic

[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 […]

Roseate, Points of Gold

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 […]

Northerners

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.

The City She Was

Second in the Mountain West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind & Donald Revell When you open this book, expect serious role-playing and syntactic tap dancing. The City She Was presents a world that brings “the horizon line into your lexicon,” and a poet’s muse (“The Endangered You”) is lent to a friend and returned […]

Scared Text

Winner of the 2011 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Cole Swensen Marvelously sustained and densely rhythmic, this tightly constructed whole is built of parts that, at each level, all the way down to the phrase, constitute poems in themselves. Baus manages to keep a cast of words in constant replay until many of them […]

Triple Review: Nick Demske, By the Numbers, and My Gargantuan Desire

For these three poets, the goal of experimentation remains the same as when Auden first hinted at it: setting off on an untested poetic path assumes profound risk. For the intrepid poet willing to police his own lines, clean his own house, and check his own impulses, a singular habitat of his own lies within scope.