Sad Gargantuans: Striven, The Bright Treatise by Jeffrey Pethybridge
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
In Darkness I Throw Open the Door: Black Stars by Ngo Tu Lap, tr. by Martha Collins and Ngo Tu Lap
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
The Letting Go: Portal by Mary Pinard
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
Reclaiming the Self: Door of Thin Skins by Shira Dentz
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
A Little Ode to Television
After the disorder of my days, and in the defeat of my evenings, I love the quiet, revocable suicide of television, especially British detective shows, where everyone is driving cooperatively on the left, but the devoted detective has broken … Read More
Crosswords
I’m hunting for a bird containing Z whose feathers were once used as money by the Mayans whose ending can lead me down a stream which Caesar once crossed in northern Italy while across mountains beginning with A lies … Read More