Four Collections on Awe By Leslie Sainz A Common Name for Everything, by Sarah Wolfson. Green Writers Press, 80 pp., $14.95. Stray Harbor, by Rage Hezekiah. Finishing Line Press, 71 pp., $19.99. & in Open, Marvel, by Felicia Zamora. Parlor Press, 90 pp. $14. Valuing, by Christopher Kondrich. University of Georgia Press, 80 pp., $19.95. […]
American Elegies
By Christian Detisch Summer Snow, by Robert Hass. Ecco, 192 pp., $16.99. American Faith, by Maya C. Popa. Sarabande Books, 96 pp., $15.95. In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché. Penguin Press, 96 pp. $24. Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts. W.W. Norton & Co, 112 pp., $15.95. “It was a failure of imagination,” […]
Building an Archive of Earth and Water
“I have seen how a person who tells a story of racism carelessly only reinscribes it in the present. I have seen how ignoring the story altogether, as if the crime never happened, also carries it into the future.”
Naming, Silencing, Surviving
“It doesn’t take a reader long to be captured by Romeo Oriogun’s compelling voice, a voice which seems equal parts observer, prophet, and reformer …”
Marginalia: Ron Tanner on Carter Sickles
The Prettiest Star, by Carter Sickles. Hub City Press, 288 pp., $26.00. Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, returns the reader to 1986, as the AIDs crisis catches fire across America. The story’s central character, Brian, is HIV-positive and may be dying of AIDs himself, shortly after his partner of two years has died […]
“Places To Lie Down and Signify”: Diana Marie Delgado’s Accumulative Verse
by Katie Berta Tracing the Horse, by Diana Marie Delgado. BOA Editions 112 pp., $17.00. “Most nights I’m face to face with the stars. / No one is more afraid of this than me. // So I find places to lie down/and signify,” Diana Delgado begins in “Little Swan,” the first poem of her debut […]
Things of Value
A review of four new books by C.J.A. “In my recent reading practice, I have been paying almost obsessive attention to the word thing …”
Sestinamerica: Poetic Form in the Age of Trump
Bruce Snider is the author of three poetry collections: Fruit, winner of the Four Lakes Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press (2020); Paradise, Indiana (Pleiades Press, 2013); and The Year We Studied Women (University of Wisconsin, 2003).
Marginalia: G.C. Waldrep on Jane Gregory & Friederike Mayröcker
Yeah No, by Jane Gregory. The Song Cave, 112 pp., $17.95.Scardanelli, by Friederike Mayröcker. The Song Cave, 72 pp., $17.95. The Song Cave made its small-press debut in 2013 with the publication of A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton, an extraordinary entry into the charged field of poetic recovery […]
American Originality, in Three Debuts
Corey Van Landingham, a contributing editor, is the author of Antidote and the recipient of a 2017 NEA fellowship. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, she currently teaches at the University of Illinois and is a book review editor for Kenyon Review.
