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.
Lyric Concord: On Political Poetry
by Kylan Rice The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance, by Philip Metres. University of Michigan Press, 216 pp., $29.95. Someone Shot My Book, by Julie Carr. University of Michigan Press, 194 pp., $29.95. Ecstatic Emigre: An Ethics of Practice, by Claudia Keelan, University of Michigan Press, 178 pp., $29.95. The Little Death […]
The Poetics (and Politics) of Spells
by Kathryn Nuernberger Ascend, Ascend, by Janaka Stucky. Third Man Books, 88 pp., $17.95A Sand Book, by Ariana Reines. Tin House Books, 323 pp., $24.95Without Protection, by Gala Mukamolova. Coffee House Press, 88 pp., $16.95. HoodWitch, byFaylita Hicks. Acre Books, 112 pp., $16.Monsters I Have Been, by Kenji C. Liu. Alice James Books, 100 pp., […]
Just Dangling:
Michael Earl Craig and the Art of Defusing a Poem by Gabriel Palacios Woods and Clouds Interchangeable, by Michael Earl Craig. Wave Books, 122 pp., $22. Two years ago at the AWP book fair in Washington D.C. I asked the smiling folks working the Wave Books table if any new Michael Earl Craig was on […]
This Long Winding Line: A Poetry Retrospective
On Alice Oswald’s Dart, edited by Shara Lessley, featuring Niall Munro, Aria Misher Aber and Yvonne Reddick.
Our Kind Multiplies: Duality and the Lyric
Split the Lark: Shara Lessley on Contemporary Poetry Double Portrait, by Brittany Perham. W.W. Norton & Company, 80 pp., $26.95. Witch Wife, by Kiki Petrosino. Sarabande, 60 pp., $16.95. I buy pencil sets and notepads in the gift shop partly as a means of distraction. Plonk the kids in front of a painting at London’s […]
Tuneful, Flirtatious, Dyspeptic
by Levi Bentley Of Mongrelitude, by Julian Talamentez Brolaski. Wave Books, 112 pp., $18. Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s Of Mongrelitude scraps with language, rolls in the dirt of it, smells every smell, however cagily. It is a playful, lonely, wild book that exercises in equal measure an array of techniques that tear apart and reconstitute language […]
