Mother Tongue
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…
The Way It Goes: Entering History by Mary Stewart Hammond (W.W. Norton & Co., 2016).
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”…
Incendiary Hearts: Somewhere in Space by Talvikki Ansel (Ohio State University Press, 2015).
“The wind comes through from that teeming world,” Talvikki Ansel writes in “Glaze,” a poem that appears part-way through her luminous, clear-eyed third collection Somewhere in Space, winner of…
Of Love and Class: Love Is No Small Thing by Meghan Kenny (Louisiana State University Press, Yellow Shoe Fiction Series, 2017).
The stories of Meghan Kenny’s debut collection Love Is No Small Thing follow a diverse range of narrators driven by a shared longing for intimacy. Characters struggle to navigate…
Islanders: House of Lords and Commons by Ishion Hutchinson (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2016)
In Ishion Hutchinson’s second collection, House of Lords and Commons, we hear the voices of Port Antonio, Jamaica, with its disparity of race and wealth, remembered and re-envisioned by…
“One Day I’ll Give Up Remembering” Land Sparing by Gabriella Klein (Nightboat Books, 2015)
Most of the poems in Gabriella Klein’s wise and beautifully strange debut collection, Land Sparing, are spoken—as so many contemporary lyric poems are—from the point of view of a…
Ordinary Sins: Excommunicados: Stories by Charles Haverty (University of Iowa Press, 2015)
To a Catholic schoolchild—baptized, confirmed, slouch-shouldered at weekly masses and fully imbued with the weight of Catholic guilt—perhaps no threat is as solemnly terrifying as that of excommunication. To…
Beautiful Doubt: A Manual for Living by Sharon Dolin (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016)
Sharon Dolin’s latest collection of poems, Manual for Living, is ‘A Guide for the Perplexed’ written in a state of perplexity. Com-prised of three ekphrastic sections, Manual for Living…
Admit Everything: Everything Broken Up Dances by James Byrne (Tupelo Press, 2015); Admit One: An American Scrapbook by Martha Collins (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016)
Everything Broken Up Dances, James Byrne’s third collection of poetry (and the first one published by an American press), opens with the author’s birth, a dislocation magnified by the…
Self-Portraiture, Family History, and the Lyric: One Hundred Hungers by Lauren Camp (Tupelo Press, 2016) and Weston’s Unsent Letters to Modotti by Chad Parmenter (Tupelo Press, 2015)
One Hundred Hungers, Lauren Camp’s third book of poems, won the 2015 Dorset Prize, selected by David Wojahn. In this lush collection, Camp evokes her father’s family history in…
RadioStay: Stay by Kathleen McGookey (Press 53, 2015); Radioland by Lesley Wheeler (Barrow Street Press, 2015)
Radioland, by Lesley Wheeler, and Stay, by Kathleen McGookey, are new books by two poets who appeared together in the spring 2014 issue of Salamander. Their collections, as in…
In Motion: Not So Ill with You and Me by Fani Papageorgiou (Shearsman Books, 2015)
Fani Papageorgiou’s newest collection of poems, Not So Ill with You and Me, is composed of four long, fragmentary poems. The book takes its title from the last sentence…