Like The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, her collection steeped in Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Maggie Smith’s Good Bones is preoccupied with the perils and mysteries of the rites of passage a child must make on the way to … Read More
The pervasiveness of a father’s ghost in José Angel Araguz’s Until We Are Level Again reminds us that old memories that threaten our equilibrium also provide, in poems, breakthroughs for the haunted. The ghost for Araguz is twofold: his father … Read More
There’s no ignoring the body, whether in the form of “a cough that was odd,” “a callus ripped open,” or “a peach pit wet and red as the cancer they’ve removed.” Fred Marchant records these physical moments in his … Read More
I once heard the poet Jane Hirshfield say that all true poems are compassionate at heart. To test her theory, she explained, she thought of the least compassionate-seeming poem she knew: Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse.” It passed … Read More
In their new books, Cold Storage and Spill, poets Keith Althaus and Kelle Groom, who both happen to hail from Cape Cod, are not isolated by its geographies—instead, each holds a dialogue with and pushes out from them. There … Read More
“Reasonably close.” Twelve years in the making, and this is how National Book Award-winning poet David Ferry rates his translation, out this September, of Virgil’s Aeneid. The Aeneid—that 10,000-line, 2,000-year-old epic poem in twelve books singing imperial Rome’s mythic … Read More
Definitions and usages of the word “time” as a noun take up two tightly printed, small-font columns in Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary. I’m not sure exactly when this 2,127-page beast (not including various appendices) came into my possession, … Read More
Prayer Book of the Anxious by Josephine Yu (Elixir Press, 2016). Letters from Limbo by Jeanne Marie Beaumont (Cavan Kerry, 2016). “Oh, but the heart isn’t fooled / by the gorgeous lies of poems,” Josephine Yu declares toward the … Read More
Whereas by Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf Press, 2017). Cold Pastoral by Rebecca Dunham (Milkweed Editions, 2017). Layli Long Soldier’s first collection tasks itself with writing back to and simultaneously interrogating official political speech. Whereas, as poem and collection, … Read More
Believe What You Can by Marc Harshman (Vandalia Press, 2016). Two Worlds Exist by Yehoshua November (Orison Books, 2016). Arsonville by David Blair (Western Michigan University Press, 2016). Embracing change in Appalachia. In his second full-length collection of … Read More
In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae (Wesleyan University Press, 2017). As I read Shane McCrae’s In the Language of My Captor, I thought of the Romanian poet Paul Celan writing in German, his first tongue … Read More
It’s been twenty-three years since the publication of Mary Stewart Hammond’s first book, Out of Canaan. Hammond’s second, Entering History, is proof that the poet’s consciousness or “moral intelligence” has been at work these last two decades, and we … Read More