Review by Wally Swist
Poetic Dynamism, Higher Consciousness, and the Lyric Voice
In considering Diane Frank’s most recent publication, While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems, what may be most ostensible is not just this poet’s irrepressible lyricism but an imagistic lyricism embedded with what Robert Bly called “the deep image.”
Review by Toti O’Brien
Hiram Larew’s fifth poetry collection was birthed during the pandemic, mostly (says the publisher’s note) during “outdoors rambles” rather than within homebound insularity.
Review by Isabella Nugent
Kyle Lucia Wu’s debut novel Win Me Something is a rare book that centers biracial Asian experience. It asks: What happens when you fit in nowhere?
Review by Kristin Dykstra
This is a book that channels readers first in one direction, then another. The title of the collection by Silvina López Medín (Argentina/US) gives the power of speech to salt, which speaks a plant, perhaps a landscape.
Review by Abeer Hoque
Punch Me Up to the Gods is Brian Broome’s memoir, an astonishing literary act of radical empathy. It doesn’t matter how differently you grew up from him, a poor dark-skinned Black gay boy in small town Ohio. You will understand every terrible choice he makes and why.
Review by Sparrow
Why read about a family? Why study the story of four individuals you don’t know, who also (in the case of a novel) don’t exist? Jules Silver grows up in Queens with a depressed, suicidal mother and a sullen younger brother.
Isaac George Lauritsen reviews Fjords vol. 2 by Zachary Schomburg
Poets like to write about death. That’s about as honest as death itself. Maybe we do it for reasons similar to those Zachary Schomburg outlines in his essay, “Poetry as Violence,” where he writes of death: “it is the absolute truth… something we all have in common, a common and uniting plight.”
Review by Wally Swist
“before daylight touches the hill the backs of the wild geese:”
If the spiritual maxim about finding what is large in what is small and what is small in what is large can be applied to paul m.’s new book of haiku, witness tree, then “The Big Elm” in the “Agawam Meadows” serves as a metaphor not only for what is perhaps most significant regarding not only m.’s haiku but the art of haiku itself.
Wally Swist reviews The Dry Bones by Paul Chambers
The Dry Bones is Paul Chambers’ third book of haiku poetry, and it is published in a limited edition of only forty numbered and signed copies by The Red Ceilings Press (53 High Street, New Mills, Derbyshire SK22 4BR Wales).
Reviewed by Nicholas Alexander Hayes
The morning after finishing Sabrina Imbler’s Dyke (geology) I texted a long-time writing partner to say that if I was still teaching Queer Lit I would add this to the reading list. The desire to include this was not because it echoed the great themes of works like Hall’s The Well of Loneliness or Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.
Review by Wally Swist
The anecdote of Joseph Campbell’s seems apt regarding my carrying Art Beck’s Etudes: A Rilke Recital in my shoulder bag for some months, especially this second winter of Coronavirus, with Art Beck’s Rilke translations acting as a beneficent constellation of guiding stars.
Review by Wally Swist
Towards the end of his watershed book, The Angled Road: Collected Poems, 1970-2020, Jonas Zdanys writes in the poem, “Love,” that “Our lives” are “a vigil/ for something whiter/ than snow,” which represents Zdanys as a reverential poet, one whose reverence is that of the harmony of the intellect and the heart (as in the compassion exhibited in the fourth chakra).
Review by Wally Swist
It is apt that one of the several quotes from a variety of notable authors prefacing David Breeden’s The Art of Prophecy: A How–To Guide from Beyond the Grave by Amos, a Major Minor Prophet would include the French philosopher Alain Badiou, a colleague of Gilles Deleuze and Michael Foucault, who writes about such concepts as truth not being either postmodern or a simple repetition of the concept of modernity, and whose philosophy just may be expressed succinctly by the quote used here, “Justice does not exist, which is why we must create it.”
Review by Nicholas Alexander Hayes
The Blue Absolute is a languid historical symphony. Shurin’s images flow in these prose poems. He exploits the affordances of the prose poem form – the nature of the lines without breaks to drive images and actions through their dramatic transformations. At times, he handles this change with a deftness that draws me back over the passages as a metonym of green eyes becomes self and mother.
Review by Art Beck
Other Shepherds is an unusual sequence that alternates translated Marina Tsvetaeva poems with poems by the translator. It appears as part of the Poets and Traitors Press series which “seeks to showcase authors who travel between writing and translation” and “views translation as forming part of a continuum with the creative writer’s work.”
Reviewed by Anu Kandikuppa
I work, you work, we all work. We work for money, fulfilment, immortality. We love our work or hate it. Often we are indifferent to work. We may never find love, but we all find work. Lack of work shames us and may destroy us. You’d think there would be more novels about work.
Reviewed by Abeer Hoque
“You were white, you were brown, you were red, you were dust.” I had been enthusiastically recommended There There by Tommy Orange a few times before I picked it up. There are precious few Native books in the American literary canon, let alone the particular and fascinating urban Indian perspective that Orange lays out.
Review by Maureen Alsop
National Book Award winner, Daniel Borzutzky’s Lake Michigan, is a book which stands up and will not sit down. The collection, structured in two Acts, declares itself as drama, and unfolds a map of living dread within the United States.
Review by Nicholas Alexander Hayes
I first read Jake Skeet’s poetry on Twitter. Someone had taken a picture of a page from his collection Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers: Poems. The snippet of verse was so queer, lusty, and dark that I quickly had the collection in my Amazon cart.
Reviewed by Wally Swist
The title of James B. Nicola’s recent collection of 88 poems references a phrase from the imminent American lyrical poet, Theodore Roethke, “My desire’s a wind trapped in a cave.” How eponymously apt it is, since it mirrors the poems that Nicola offers us—as scrolls unwound in the air.
Review by Nicholas Alexander Hayes
In my twenties and thirties, I felt Baudrillard on a pale horse (occasionally with Ballard riding aside) wrapped the pall of simulacrum around the world for me. The vain specters of symbols without referents have helped guide me not just through contemporary museums but the lived world.
Review by Abeer Hoque
I Am, I Am, I Am is a memoir in essays by Maggie O’Farrell. Each chapter deals with a different “near death” experience from her life. The chapters are unevenly written with three brilliant pieces (the first, the last, and the one on miscarriages).
Review by Abeer Hoque
I had heard from a friend that listening to Michelle Obama’s Becoming was like being in a conversation with friends. So I eschewed my normal e-book ways and splurged for the Audible book. I wasn’t disappointed.
Review by Wally Swist
I first came across the poetry of Art Beck while working as a cataloguer in an all-poetry bookstore in 1977. Hugh Miller, Bookseller was located on Crown Street in New Haven.
Review by Art Beck
I like this book a lot. In large part because it addresses a need for a substantial, “curated” selection from the some four hundred poems Rilke wrote in French in the last years of his life.
Review by Amanda Marbais
Kim Magowan’s novel, The Light Source, begins with a perfect distillation of the complicated nature of friendships that span decades.
Review by Nicholas Alexander Hayes
Ascher/Straus’s coauthored novel slips around its dreamily constructed narrative. The story nominally follows Valeria through her relationships with family, lovers, and acquaintances.
Among my many favorite books of poetry in translation, including W. S. Merwin’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Robert Bly’s translation of the “first modern Norwegian poet,” Rolf Jacobsen’s The Roads Have Come to an End Now, and Edmund Keeley’s and Philip Sherrard’s translation of C. P. Cavafy’s Collected Poems, there is a new addition: Art Beck’s translation of the Roman poet Martial (40 A.D.-104 A.D.) in a unique and refreshing selection just published by Shearsman Books, in England.
By Abeer Hoque “People are never as afraid as their rulers think they should be,” Vic said. “Every regime finds this out the hard way.” Chaitali Sen’s debut novel The Pathless Sky is remarkable for its assured and intense politics and intimacy. John and...
By Abeer Hoque
“One can tell instinctively what sort of flower a person would be if born a plant.”
The Door is the plainspoken eloquent and devastating novel by Hungarian great, Magda Szabó (translated by Len Rix).