The desert doesn’t know we exist: Robert Smith singing through the speakers of a night-lit pool where the heat feels material with a sickness, and I insist I’m not angry with the man reading the Tao te Ching on the terry daybed beside me. The desert […]
I loved the lie I loved lying next to the winter I lived beside the lie lying thin & white. I loved lying beside the tides. He let me drive the winding canyon to Malibu. I let him unwind. I loved being alive the winter […]
I love Sarah’s piece because the reader can actually see the brain’s neurons firing throughout. It’s reflective, beautiful, and lyrical. Sarah’s work reveals a writer and human in transition and we’re lucky as readers to get to witness this change in this piece. Read “On Self-Regard” by Sarah […]
I am in awe of the force of the electrons and intellect in Nancy Lynée Woo’s poems. There’s always a thread within these poems being tugged in all directions. The results are full of lightning and light. Read “The Line Between” by Nancy Woo >> Read […]
David Baker is author of twelve books of poetry, most recently Swift: New and Selected Poems, (Norton, 2019), Scavenger Loop (Norton, 2015), and Never-Ending Birds (Norton, 2009), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize in 2011. His six books of prose include Seek After: Essays on Modern Lyric Poets (SFA […]
To read Indictus (Noemi Press), Natalie Eilbert’s second book of poems (her first was Swan Feast, published by Bloof Books), is to have an experience beyond reading. It would be easy to describe this book with empty adjectives such as fierce, powerful, or obsessive, but this book is […]
Alex Lemon’s most recent books are Feverland and The Wish Book (a finalist for Best Poetry Collection by The Writer’s League of Texas). He is the author of Happy: A Memoir (Scribner; a finalist for Best Book of Non-fiction by The Writer’s League of Texas) and three other poetry collections: Mosquito, Hallelujah Blackout, and Fancy Beasts. […]
I find the most challenging book reviews to write are the ones on books that are complex and ambitious. Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s third book of poems, Rocket Fantastic, is one of those books. So much is happening on so many levels in these poems that one could write about anything really. […]
A 2015 Pew Fellow in the Arts, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Vermont Studio Center, and the American Antiquarian Society. He is the author of five […]
Before I open a book of poems, I always feel a sense of hope. Oftentimes that hope quickly deflates in the first few lines. Sometimes that hope comes in and out like a breeze. Very rarely, that hope turns to something akin to joy. Chen Chen’s debut book of poems, […]
