First, a portion of “American Arithmetic” to set the tone: At the National Museum of the American Indian, 68 percent of the collection is from the United States. I am doing my best to not become a museum of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. […]
“…let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come.” -Hamlet, Act V, Scene 1 I like this as a pet word: “maquillage.” This collection is so full of violet-eyeshadow words that I had to keep my dictionary on hand. Maybe that’s why Gracie Leavitt’s Livingry feels […]
In Unsun: f/11, his intrepid, trailblazing fifth volume of poetry, American poet Andrew Zawacki lends his inimitable poetic voice to the task of welding together the various pressing possibilities and dangers of our contemporary “global pastoral.” Gone are the days of the uncharted, the carrier pigeon, the isolated, the quiet […]
Like the title of Jenny Molberg’s Refusal, the reader’s initial reaction is to refuse this agonizing, electric work because of the pain the “I” lays open. But it’s impossible to stop reading because of the raw exposure and bravery that leap off the page. The first poem, “Note,” begins the […]
“What is the right time to announce you’re named after your dead sister?” asks Kristin Czarnecki, professor of English at Georgetown College, in her hybrid memoir/literary excavation into sibling loss, The First Kristin: The Story of a Naming. The author has known all her life that she is named for […]
When one acquires and reads a Yusef Komunyakaa collection, expectations range from the philosophical to the spiritual, from the musical to the political. In Komunyakaa’s beautifully collated Night Animals, readers receive not only the usual Komunyakaa fare, but also visual treats from artist Rachel Bliss, which add a Bosch-like bent […]
“The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved,” claimed the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. In Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s powerful fourth collection, Seeing the Body, that beloved is her mother, to whom the book is dedicated. This mother (and her life, illness, death, and memory) becomes the powerful […]
If you open Danielle Vogel’s book, Edges & Fray, a few pages in, you’ll see on the left-hand page three square photographs of birds’ nests, and on the right-hand side syntactical fragments including, “a book arrives in threads—.” As the interrelation of nest-building and text-composing emerges, we become privy […]
Consider the materials from which an arrow can be made: wood, aluminum, carbon, fiberglass. Each material used to construct an arrow ultimately serves the arrow’s intended purpose. Now think of poems as arrows, gathered into a quiver for safe-harboring until their use. These poem-arrows rest, unused until the poet or […]
Since briefly working with Laura van den Berg on a story of my own years ago, I have admired her flourishing career and devoured her work as it is released. She is one of those writers whose work makes me feel that I become a better writer myself through mere […]
