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 […]
In the poem “Understories,” Adam Clay writes, “Say observation / is the kindest of all actions,” and, in context, these lines are less a command than an experiment—which is good, because I think experience disproves the hypothesis: there are greater kindnesses than observation. At the same time, observation is a […]
When I shared a poem from Scared Violent Like Horses to a friend who has extensively traveled the United States, she immediately placed the setting. There are thirty-six townships named Springfield in the United States, but the imagery in Scared Violent Like Horses is distinctive enough to render the town […]
Sara Goodman’s Starfish begins in a polar vortex. The speaker lives in Chicago where, “The Northern Lights cast orange on a/network of lakes in Northern Finland.//Dip the entire thing/into an ice cold lake.//That new new.” I am reading the book on a park bench in Miami. It’s late July, humid. Green parakeets […]
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 […]
