July 3, 2020
Carrion Items Must Be Stowed: On Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going by Jessica Jacobs
New York, NY: Four Way Books, 2019. 109 pages. $15.95. For Jessica Jacobs, the figurative values of poetry build a consciousness somewhere between the earth and what’s beyond the earth, […]
June 26, 2020
“The Defiance of Plants”: On Kathryn Nuernberger’s Rue
Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2020. 104 pages. $17.00. Kathryn Nuernberger’s third book of poetry, Rue, finds the speaker mid-life, mid-marriage, in the middle of America with a restless energy at […]
June 26, 2020
On Tracing the Horse by Diana Marie Delgado
Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2019. 112 pages. $17.00. Diana Marie Delgado’s poems in her debut full-length collection, Tracing the Horse, dwell in the real world: cousins kiss behind a dumpster, […]
June 19, 2020
On The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen
The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions. New York, NY: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2017. 336 pages. $27.99. In ancient Ohio, in […]
June 12, 2020
On Animal by Dorothea Lasky
Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2019. 136 pages. $20.00. Although Animal is a book of lectures about poetry and not a book of poems, Dorothea Lasky positions herself within it in […]
June 12, 2020
On Animul/Flame by Michelle Lewis
Saint Paul, MN: Conduit Books, 2019. 76 pages. $16.00. Selected by Bob Hicok as the inaugural winner of the Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize, Michelle Lewis’s Animul/Flame is a self-assured, […]
June 5, 2020
Where Differences Speak Together: On Reading Jeff Alessandrelli’s Fur Not Light
Portland, OR: Burnside Review Press, 2019. 80 pages. $14.00. Poet and essayist Jeff Alessandrelli’s second poetry collection, Fur Not Light, celebrates the simultaneous, multivocal experience of imagination and reality. This […]
May 29, 2020
On The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter
Columbus, OH: Two Dollar Radio, 2019. 284 pages. $17.99. Let’s begin with how it ends: Cassie swallows a handful of her mother’s pills, lies beside her father’s grave, and waits […]
May 29, 2020
Groomed for Compliance: On Erin Williams’s Commute
New York, NY: Abrams ComicArts, 2019. 304 pages. $24.99. A commute is, at once, near universal and hyper-specific. Anyone who works outside the home has one—the experience is so common, […]
May 22, 2020
Distances of Waste: Anders Carlson-Wee’s The Low Passions
New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. 80 pages. $26.95. Marshaling a critical rusticity reminiscent of America’s late-century romantics—Larry Levis, Robert Bly, James Wright, etc.—Anders Carlson-Wee’s The Low […]
May 15, 2020
On Survival Is a Style by Christian Wiman
New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Macmillan, 2020. 112 pages. $24.00. In the story of the ten lepers, Jesus heals ten lepers, but only one second-class Samaritan turns around to […]
May 15, 2020
“A deep well of love”: On Fiona Benson’s Vertigo & Ghost
London, England: Cape Poetry, 2019. 112 pages. £10.00. “Christ. I never thought I’d beg. No matter.” —Fiona Benson, “Pear Tree in Blossom” Vertigo & Ghost, Fiona Benson’s second collection of […]