Among the Ruins: Guide to Greece by George Kalogeris
Guide to Greece by George Kalogeris (Louisiana State University Press, 2018). The title of George Kalogeris’s latest collection of poems is a nod to an ancient travelogue in…
Implacable: Thomas Bernhard: Collected Poems, translated by James Reidel
Thomas Bernhard: Collected Poems, translated by James Reidel (Seagull Books, 2017). Thomas Bernhard’s prose has an implacable forward motion, driven by repetition and elaboration. A sentence in his…
Hand in Hand: No Small Gift by Jennifer Franklin
No Small Gift by Jennifer Franklin (Four Way Books, 2018). Jennifer Franklin’s No Small Gift explores ideas of love and punishment, and the way the two can fluctuate…
After Innocence: Good Bones by Maggie Smith (Tupelo Press, 2017) and The Amoeba Game by Tara Skurtu (Eyewear Publishing, 2017)
Like The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, her collection steeped in Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Maggie Smith’s Good Bones is preoccupied with the perils and mysteries of the rites…
The Knock of the Blade: Until We Are Level Again by Jose Angel Araguz (Mongrel Empire Press, 2018) and Hard Child by Natalie Shapero (Copper Canyon Press, 2017)
The pervasiveness of a father’s ghost in José Angel Araguz’s Until We Are Level Again reminds us that old memories that threaten our equilibrium also provide, in poems, breakthroughs for…
Refuge: Said Not Said by Fred Marchant (Graywolf Press, 2017).
There’s no ignoring the body, whether in the form of “a cough that was odd,” “a callus ripped open,” or “a peach pit wet and red as the cancer…
To Reclaim the Body: Thrust by Heather Derr-Smith (Persea, 2017)
I once heard the poet Jane Hirshfield say that all true poems are compassionate at heart. To test her theory, she explained, she thought of the least compassionate-seeming poem…
Geographies: Cold Storage by Keith Althaus (Off the Grid Press, 2016); Spill by Kelle Groom (Anhinga Press, 2017)
In their new books, Cold Storage and Spill, poets Keith Althaus and Kelle Groom, who both happen to hail from Cape Cod, are not isolated by its geographies—instead, each…
Here as I Am: The Aeneid by Virgil, translated by David Ferry (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
“Reasonably close.” Twelve years in the making, and this is how National Book Award-winning poet David Ferry rates his translation, out this September, of Virgil’s Aeneid. The Aeneid—that 10,000-line,…
Editor’s Note
Definitions and usages of the word “time” as a noun take up two tightly printed, small-font columns in Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary. I’m not sure exactly when this…
Unearthing
Prayer Book of the Anxious by Josephine Yu (Elixir Press, 2016). Letters from Limbo by Jeanne Marie Beaumont (Cavan Kerry, 2016). “Oh, but the heart isn’t fooled / by…
Poetry as Resistance and Remembrance
Whereas by Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf Press, 2017). Cold Pastoral by Rebecca Dunham (Milkweed Editions, 2017). Layli Long Soldier’s first collection tasks itself with writing back to and…