(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014). Once in the West, Christian Wiman’s fourth collection of poems, enacts a spiritual quest that is simultaneously a kerosene-and-blood- and-shit-and-morphine-fueled struggle to make something out of pain that is both physical and spiritual … Read More
(Cervena Barva Press, 2013). The eye is a complicated organ. It captures images only after light has passed through the lens, been received by cells in the retina, and then encoded into signals that optic nerves have sent on … Read More
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press, 2014); Forgiveness Forgiveness by Shane McCrae (Factory Hollow Press, 2014). Claudia Rankine and Shane McCrae are both writers who directly, clearly, and pointedly approach the past and present injustices inherited … Read More
Second Childhood: Poems by Fanny Howe (Graywolf Press, 2014); Our Vanishing by Frannie Lindsay (Red Hen Press, 2014). New books by Fanny Howe and Frannie Lindsay explore facets of faith and aging. A passage from the title poem … Read More
Striven, The Bright Treatise by Jeffrey Pethybridge (Noemi Press, 2013). In Jeffrey Pethybridge’s debut collection of poems, Striven, The Bright Treatise, four seconds stretch to fill 194 pages, and then continue to stretch. These four seconds, tragically, mark the … Read More
Black Stars by Ngo Tu Lap, translated from the Vietnamese by Martha Collins and Ngo Tu Lap (Milkweed Editions, 2013). Ngo Tu Lap, who has published over twenty books, among them book-length translations from the Russian and the French, … Read More
Portal by Mary Pinard (Salmon Poetry, 2014). When writing poetry about traumatic loss, words advance and retreat glacier-like, leaving writer and reader inexorably changed through engagements with form, the new shapes natural processes yield, the landscape that grief and … Read More
Door of Thin Skins by Shira Dentz (CavanKerry Press, 2013). Door of Thin Skins is a collage of poetry and prose—confused, astonished, active, and passive—set in 1980s New York. It is the harrowing story of the abuse of a … Read More
It’s hard not to warm to the archness of a collection that begins, “Two doors down lived a descendant of de Sade,” lifting a trapdoor to literal, figurative, and uniquely Western nightmare. At first, the poems of Will Schutt’s Westerly … Read More
Having admired Averill Curdy’s work since I first read “Sparrow Trapped in the Airport” in the November 2005 issue of Poetry, I snapped up Song & Error soon after its March 2013 release and relived the discovery of that poem, … Read More
The poems of Nicole Terez Dutton’s debut collection, If One of Us Should Fall, which received the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, are marked by music and intimacy. Often addressing “you” or “we,” the speaker invites readers to travel with … Read More