Following the thirty-six years of Generalissimo Franco’s dictatorial rule of Spain, the country began its swift transition to a democracy in 1975. The surrender of power was quick and relatively drama-free, considering that this very political party had long … Read More
Grammar is not only a map to a new language, but a map into a new world. In the United States, where on the one hand, certain biblical verses are quoted for political ends large and small, but on … Read More
Furs Not Mine by Andrea Cohen (Four Way Books, 2015). The Wilderness by Sandra Lim (Norton, 2014). If there is a world in a grain of sand, Andrea Cohen lifts it up to us in the predominantly short poems of … Read More
(W. W. Norton, 2014) Lines of Defense, Stephen Dunn’s seventeenth book of poetry, is provocatively titled. On the most literal level, the title speaks to the collection’s epigraph, which comes from the Italian poet and novelist Cesare Pavese, an … Read More
(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