Sara Majka’s stories are imbued with longing for lost loved ones and lost homes in places where the narrator, Anne, has lived. But the stories are also about places…

  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…

  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…

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…

  (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…

  (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…

  (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…

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,…

  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…

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…

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,…

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…