Victoria Redel delivers the harrowing exodus of her extended refugee family through the frame of exile from Eden not as punishment but as an inevitable escape—it is these narrative inheritances that shape the speaker’s own story of survival. Redel reimagines the exile from Eden narrative, offered through seven poems spoken through the voice of Adam […]
When I am most stressed—when a concern hard and intractable churns, when a thought restless and wiry knots—I need a plan. That’s what I think. A notebook fills with charts, and impatient lines cross out items on the to-do list. An illusion of control. And then there’s the doodling while I listen to a lover […]
Helge Torvund’s Seriously Well is a case study in the complexity of simplicity, offering a striking meditation on the alchemy of art and life that walks a circuitous path through memory, music, and light to the moment the author learns he has a potentially life-threatening illness. Using language that is conversational, and at times spare, […]
Myth and legend are such magnificent subjects, ripe with the potential for resonance with modern circumstances. When we are young, discovering a particular legend that leads to fantastic reverie with the adventure of outwitting gods or coming across a figure whose tragic circumstances speak to our own narratives can provide access to otherwise unreachable histories. […]
Striding through the woods one autumn afternoon, with oak nuts falling, a red hawk sailing overhead, and a breeze cooling his reddened cheeks, the poet notes that, “all is living and all is dead.” It’s an observation that reflects, and in some way defines, the content of this collection by radiation oncologist Matthew Mumber. Confronting […]
Swansdown is dedicated to the poet’s brother, Michael Platt, who died in 2018. The collection begins with his brother’s death in “Sleep.” From there Platt expands through the world while retaining an anchor to his brother and his family, and then turns, inevitably, to his own anticipated end. Platt’s gift is his ability to connect […]
In Blood Snow (Wave Books, 2022), dg nanouk okpik’s visionary pastorals mourn the melt, illness, and loss occasioned by the Anthropocene, while at the same time thrumming with mystical insight and heart-stopping beauty. okpik uses the split pronoun “she/I” to expand and complicate individual subjecthood. In her first book, Corpse Whale (The University of Arizona […]
Whenever I read a book of poems coming out of New York City, I am always left wondering whether I’m reading poems and listening for the city, or whether I’m looking at the poet gesture like they’re a New Yorker. And I wonder if this is what passes for New York School-ish style these days. […]
In Kien Lam’s slim but fruitful poetry collection Extinction Theory, readers discover intimate rationales regarding some of life’s most silent, mind-boggling mysteries. The speaker questions God’s residence, appearance, and existence. Simultaneously, the speaker also documents the Asian-American experience—rife with linguistic and cultural differences, as well as increasing racism amidst America’s ever-shifting sociopolitical landscape. The poems […]
How does language—with its rich histories, tonal registers, and lexicon—shape our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world? This question is central to John Latta’s new poetry collection, Some Alphabets, which deftly explores the relationships between meaning and the limits of language. The book is divided into five sections: Sections I, II, and […]