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.
Featured poetry from the Fall/Winter 2011 issue.
Featured poetry from the Fall/Winter 2011 issue.
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 […]
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 […]
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.
Jerry Harp opens his critical biography boldly asserting that Donald Justice “should be considered among the greatest experimental poets of the latter half of the twentieth century.” Although Justice is hardly a name that comes to mind within the context of experimental writing, Harp maintains that Justice’s work is art that “challenges the very tradition of which it is a part.