November 22, 2019
On The Book of the Dead by Muriel Rukeyser
Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2018. 144 pages. $17.99. In her introduction to A Muriel Rukeyser Reader (1993), Adrienne Rich expressed the hope that “more of her books will […]
November 15, 2019
On Camonghne Felix’s Build Yourself a Boat
Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2019. 58 pages. $16.00. What use is any treatise on grief or philosophy of its properties—the recursion, the desires for myth, the disorganization of real time—that […]
November 15, 2019
“Without These Documents”: On Philip Metres’s Returning to Jaffa
Doha, Qatar / Richmond, VA: Diode Editions, 2019. 36 pages. $12.00. Documentary poetry exists on a kind of continuum. On the extreme end, you have projects like Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day, […]
November 8, 2019
On Rag by Maryse Meijer
New York, NY: FSG Originals, 2019. 144 pages. $15.00. The horror genre frequently dismantles and redefines the structures which have terrified audiences for generations. Horror evolves in trends—paranormal shifts to […]
November 1, 2019
On Doomstead Days by Brian Teare
New York, NY: Nightboat Books, 2019. 176 pages. $17.95. I walk out of my house after reading Brian Teare’s sixth full-length collection, Doomstead Days, and see them everywhere—rainbow slicks on […]
November 1, 2019
Sacred Hauntings: On Randon Billings Noble’s Be with Me Always
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 186 pages. $19.95. Like many people, I first read Wuthering Heights as a young adolescent. Heathcliff was a brooding, volatile outsider and as […]
October 25, 2019
On Reenactments: Poems & Translations by Hai-Dang Phan
Louisville, KY: Sarabande, 2019. 98 pages. $15.95. The speaker of Hai-Dang Phan’s debut book of poems, Reenactments, rarely grieves. Nor does he assume the role of the bereaved, though there […]
October 18, 2019
On In Country by Hugh Martin
Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2018. 104 pages. $17.00. When I was on deployment. When I was over there. When I was gone. In the suck. In the shit. There are […]
October 18, 2019
On In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World by Simon Garfield
New York, NY: Atria Books/Simon & Schuster, 2019. 336 pages. $25.00. “It is the small we are inclined to be fond of,” wrote Edmund Burke in his 1757 treatise on […]
October 11, 2019
On A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems by Marilyn Chin
New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018. 224 pages. $26.95. Marilyn Chin has dedicated A Portrait of the Self as Nation to her students, presumably the students with whom […]
October 4, 2019
“Memory of Presence”: On Andrés Cerpa’s Debut Collection
Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy. Andrés Cerpa. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2019. 65 pages. $15.95. “What interests me about poetry,” writes Jack Underwood in the May 2018 […]
October 4, 2019
On Song for the Unraveling of the World by Brian Evenson
Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2019. 232 pages. $16.95. Brian Evenson’s new collection of horror fiction, Song for the Unraveling of the World, delivers on genre expectations. The stories are […]