“Kyrie’s sonnets aren’t only in conversation with historical events … but with the history of verse itself.”
Survival Songs
By David Roderick Oh You Robot Saints!, by Rebecca Morgan Frank. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 96 pp., $15.95.Year of the Dog, by Deborah Paredez. BOA Editions, 122 pp., $17.Hinge, by Molly Spencer. Southern Illinois University Press, 82 pp., $16.95. “What hurt you into poetry?” is a common poetry workshop icebreaker. Inspired by W.H. Auden’s elegy […]
Marginalia: Chet’la Sebree, Andrew Ciotola, Ron Tanner, G.C. Waldrep
The Sum of Trifles, by Julia Ridley Smith. University of Georgia Press, 238 pp., $22.95. Julia Ridley Smith’s memoir-in-essays, The Sum of Trifles, begins with an invitation from her mother to “come in the house.” The invitation is a memory, for Smith is visiting the house well after her parents’ deaths. Her sharp, chain-smoking mother […]
“A Knife Housed in Glass”: Grief and Art in Victoria Chang
By Katie Berta OBIT, by Victoria Chang. Copper Canyon Press, 120 pp., $17 In her newest poetry collection, OBIT, Victoria Chang quotes John Updike, who wrote, “Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?” […]
In Praise of Hereness
By Esteban Rodríguez Twice Alive, by Forrest Gander. New Directions, 96 pp., $16.95.Strip, by Jessica Abughattas. University of Arkansas Press, 75 pp., $16.95.I Thought There Would Be More Wolves, by Sara Ryan. University of Alaska Press, 95 pp., $14.95. It will no doubt be difficult to look back on the past year and a half […]
Stepping onto the Stage: Ambition and Risk in Three Debuts
By Corey Van Landingham All Heathens, by Marianne Chan. Sarabande Books, 74 pp., $15.95.Field Music, by Alexandria Hall. Ecco, 77 pp., $16.99.Bodega, by Su Hwang. Milkweed Editions, 94 pp., $16.00. I don’t believe in perfect books. Especially not perfect debuts. Part of what makes a first book so exciting is the wildness and idiosyncrasy that […]
Private Poems, Public Language; Public Poems, Private Language
By Christian Detisch A Better Place Is Hard To Find, by Aaron Fagan. The Song Cave 84 pp., $17.95 Un-American, by Hafizah Geter, Wesleyan University Press, 104 pp., $10.78. Blizzard, by Henri Cole. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 80 pp. $24. One of my favorite short stories is “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff, in […]
Against Paradise
By Kylan Rice Black Sun, by Toby Martinez de las Rivas. Faber & Faber, 72 pp., $15.92. The Glass Constellation, by Arthur Sze. Copper Canyon, 562 pp., $35. Earth is Best, by Peter O’Leary. The Cultural Society, 112 pp., $20. In his lectures on Parmenides, delivered at the University of Freiburg at the height of […]
This Long Winding Line: A Poetry Retrospective
Ai’s Killing Floor (1979) Edited by Shara Lessley I first read Ai’s poetry as an undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine—or, rather, it read me. Read into my conscience, its deepest recesses, accessing things I’d tried to repress or deny: shame, brutality, envy, desire, arrogance, sexual pleasure, prejudice—in other words, humanity. I remember the […]
Spectral Feelings
Scope and Scale in Three New Books By Corey Van Landingham Foreign Bodies, by Kimiko Hahn. W.W. Norton & Co., 109 pp., $26.95. The Book of Jane, by Jennifer Habel. University of Iowa Press, 93 pp., $19.95. The Galleons, by Rick Barot. Milkweed Editions, 71 pp., $16.00. In Memory and Enthusiaism, W.S. Di Piero writes […]
