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…
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.…
Directions Westerly by Will Schutt (Yale University Press, 2013); Strange Borderlands by Ben Berman (Able Muse Press, 2013).
It’s hard not to warm to the archness of a collection that begins, “Two doors down lived a descendant of de Sade,” lifting a trapdoor to literal, figurative, and uniquely…
Metamorphoses Song & Error: Poems by Averill Curdy (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2013).
Having admired Averill Curdy’s work since I first read “Sparrow Trapped in the Airport” in the November 2005 issue of Poetry, I snapped up Song & Error soon after its…
Immersed in Song If One of Us Should Fall by Nicole Terez Dutton (University of Pittsburgh, 2012)
The poems of Nicole Terez Dutton’s debut collection, If One of Us Should Fall, which received the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, are marked by music and intimacy. Often addressing…