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 […]
You have yet to hear a voice like Essy Stone’s. It’s a voice that suffers no fools, is serrated, discerning, contrary, and consummate ... a gutting, questioning, exploratory voice with the hiss of backwater ballads, several cups of the blues, an almanac of prayers and hexes, a hint of duende, […]
Essy Stone recently completed a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University. She received an MFA from the University of Miami, but spent most of her life as a waitress in East Tennessee. Her poetry has been published in Prairie Schooner, 32 Poems, and is forthcoming in The […]
In June, I received the sad news that the wonderful Argentinian poet Mirta Rosenberg was very ill. I had just been at the Banff Literary Translation Centre in Canada with Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, her former student and co-author with her of the book Bichos. He sent a message that he […]
