Dylan Thomas defined poetry as “the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an over-clothed blindness to a naked vision.” In her debut poetry collection, some other wet landscape, Lynne McEniry holds a command of narrative and syntax that moves through time and place from “blindness to vision.” Tension builds and releases […]
What we do: a statement and question. The sorts of ways we interact with life and death, delights and tragedies, privilege and lack of access. As in, we do what we do. How we require each other. How everything, everything, can be witnessed as sin, blessing, or nothing at all. […]
Actual Miles, Jim Warner’s newest collection of poetry, is a moving compilation of diverse pieces reflecting experiences of a hybrid identity, life in transition, addiction, romance, and mortality. The culmination of which reveals an overwhelming familiarity with the ebb and flow of impermanence. Impermanence pervades this collection, whether present in […]
Joseph Harrington’s collection Of Some Sky is a highly organized mess, and he wants you to know it. In its first poem, “Earth Day Suite,” schoolchildren stage a play that describes the onset of the Anthropocene, serving as a wonderful introduction to Harrington’s vibrant and chaotic world in the poems […]
Tamara Zbrizher’s striking debut, Tell Me Something Good, opens with a refreshing confession of ignorance: “I don’t know what it’s called/one of those hanging house plants.” The conversational tone welcomes the reader in and invites humor. This poet is no wiser than the rest of us and the plant could […]
The first time I heard Jessica Laser read from Sergei Kuzmich From All Sides at the “No Fair Fair” at AWP in 2019, I could tell that each memorized word was carefully weighed. I and the rest of the audience could also tell that the poems were funny. Humor notwithstanding, […]
After reading each poem in Jennifer Franklin’s No Small Gift, I had to put the book down for several moments before picking it back up again—the power and urgency in each poem feels like paint still wet, like one is encountering a vibrant, concentrated intimacy in the making. Setting the […]
Companionship, loss, motherhood, and the many other forms love takes features in the thematic foreground of Sandra Cisneros’ Puro Amor. Republished and bound as a chapbook with the addition of Liliana Valenzuela’s Spanish translation and never before seen sketches by the author, Puro Amor itself portraits a kind of triptych: […]
John James is a collage artist. He cuts and pastes, making neighbors of images across continents, across centuries. He “disrupts” (his word) extant images, in order to predicate echoes between them; he arranges slices of the past into tectonic plates, into double exposures, into quilts and arguments. This is true […]
Timothy Donnelly is the author of The Problem of the Many (Wave Books, 2019), The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books, 2010), which won the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003). His chapbook Hymn to Life was recently published by Factory Hollow […]
