The Sea Came Up & Drowned, Rachel Jamison Webster’s fourth book, is a collection of poems extracted from John McPhee’s Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction book Annals of the Former World. Webster’s “mined” poems are about actual mining, and how through excavation humans have gained knowledge about the earth’s interior and […]
Maybe I wanted to be owned. from “Vessel” In Boat Burned, Kelly Grace Thomas revisits many of the themes that are familiar to poetry written by women as well as about women’s lives, such as marital expectations, body image, self-loathing, romantic desire, and parent-daughter connection. In her own skilled language, […]
One cannot deny the sheer artistic prowess of Sami Miranda and his debut collection, We Is. As a multidisciplinary artist, educator, Program Manager/ Curator and Board Member of the non-profit institution, The American Poetry Museum, it is no question that this book would mirror how Miranda uniquely functions in the […]
In Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going, poet Jessica Jacobs has engaged with a project that many poets would fear to undertake and some prospective readers might fear would be too straightforward and predictable. This book charts the narrator’s love for her wife-to-be—the long prelude and eventual marriage. In […]
Once, several years ago, on the mesa between Tetilla peak and the Santa Fe River gorge, I saw what I believe to this day was a wolf running. I believed at the time the creature was male. Now I am certain there was a girl inside. This new conclusion stems […]
What would a mashup of Carrie Bradshaw, Madame Bovary, and Twiggy look like? Christina Chiu, author of Troublemaker & Other Saints, appears to have imagined such a character in her new novel, Beauty, winner of the James Alan McPherson Award. From watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s as a child, Amy Wong’s […]
What a time to read Megan Merchant’s new poetry collection, Before the Fevered Snow. I’ve been hunkered down in my house for five weeks now, waiting for the vicious COVID-19 pandemic to pass. Sacrificing for others. Doing my part in the face of fear, pain, and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Merchant’s book […]
Arthur Sze’s tenth book of poetry, Sight Lines, has just won the 2019 National Book Award (NBA). An honored poet with notable accolades (he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his 2009 book, The Ginkgo Light), his newest collection has already garnered high praise in interviews and reviews. Sight Lines […]
With his new collection On the Shores of Welcome Home, Bruce Weigl brings his expansive proclivities to a striking culmination, the poet balancing fervor and reserve, trepidation and aplomb, indignation and acceptance. In poem after poem, Weigl reexamines his Vietnam experiences, post-war realities, and the perennial effects of PTSD, offering commentaries on human nature, […]
[ The story survived upstream of me] Jerika Marchan scatters words like driftwood. Her images float like household goods carried away in a flood. SWOLE is aware of its own interest in water: the book opens with a river, floats the reader through pages of disaster and struggle, and then […]