“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.
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 […]
