January 26, 2018
The Flower Behind God: On Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf
Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2017. 100 pages. $16.95. Every alcoholic is also a poet, even if, as the childish rhyme goes, they don’t know it. In essence, they take […]
January 26, 2018
On Silence, In the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge
Translated by Becky L. Cook. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2017. 160 pages. $19.95. “What is silence? Where is it? Why is it more important now than ever?” Erling Kagge’s […]
January 19, 2018
On Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly
New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017. 112 Pages. $22.95. I’ll put it right out there: I’m no newcomer to the work of Beth Ann Fennelly. Her refreshingly like-it-is […]
January 19, 2018
On The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 196 pages. $22.00. Thinking the “unthinkable” would seem to present an impossible task, particularly when that unthinkable thing is the unfolding environmental disaster […]
January 12, 2018
Artifact of its own Evaporation: Jeffrey Schultz’s Civil Twilight
New York, NY: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2017. 90 pages. $15.99. “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,” wrote Hopkins. He was depressed, and so am I, and so is […]
January 12, 2018
On Walking On by Cole Swensen
New York, NY: Nightboat Books, 2017. 110 pages. $16.95. Writerly relationships to walking, whether through philosophical histories of wanderlust or souls of environmental conscience, yield fascinating insights into the pedestrian […]
January 5, 2018
On Eleni Vakalo’s Before Lyricism
Edited and Translated by Karen Emmerich. Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017. 133 pages. $18.00. In reviewing a new translation of Greek poet Eleni Vakalo in 1973, Kimon Friar followed […]
January 5, 2018
On A Timeshare by Margaret Ross
Oakland, CA: Omnidawn, 2015. 104 pages. $17.95 About Emily Dickinson, James Longenbach has written, “Her poems are so strange, so shockingly themselves, that no fully programmatic account of them could […]
December 22, 2017
On Map Drawn by a Spy by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2017. 240 pages. $18.00. When Fidel Castro passed away last November, commentators were quick to offer judgments that were less objective appraisals of the former Cuban […]
December 22, 2017
“More Stone than Wood” . . . “More Flesh than Stone”: On Kathy Fagan’s Sycamore
Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2017. 88 pages. $16.00. “Sticks and stones may break your bones,” the old saying goes, “but words will never hurt you.” If this is true, however, […]
December 19, 2017
December Micro-Reviews
Nicole Cooley. Girl after Girl after Girl. Louisiana State University Press, 2017. 80 pages. $18.95. It mystified me when my children had little interest in dolls, because I was besotted with them—soft […]
December 19, 2017
December 2017 Micro-Reviews
Nicole Cooley. Girl after Girl after Girl. Louisiana State University Press, 2017. 80 pages. $18.95. It mystified me when my children had little interest in dolls, because I was besotted with them—soft […]