The Language of Women
I have in front of me two collections which should shake the foundations of what a person thinks they know about conception, child loss,…
Strange Countries
If poetry is the news that stays news, its daily headlines concern how the strange stays strange: the strangeness of countries, the strangeness of…
Unwinding Underground: A Review of Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s Rain in Plural
Rain in Plural by Fiona Sze-Lorrain. Princeton University Press, 2020. 105 pages. $17.95. The multiple layers and the angles of Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s fourth collection…
Drafted Into Music: A Review of Music for the Dead and Resurrected
Existing in the space of both documentary and theater, Valzhyna Mort’s newest collection of poetry Music for the Dead and Resurrected rides in on…
Interior Landscapes: Smaller Songs and Theorem
These two new poetry collections—one a chapbook, and one full-length—leap from their pages, exploring a range of space for the music of language to…
Inside a Crisis: A Review of Danger Days by Catherine Pierce and Requisite by Tanya Holtland
“We are inside a crisis of planetary scale and so too is our grieving, or our anger, and our response…” —Tanya Holtland, preface to…
Thinking in Circles
Reading the new selected poems of Wanda Coleman, Wicked Enchantment (Black Sparrow Press, 2020), at the same time as Kristi Carter’s new collection Aria…
The Fragile Human: a review of Tess Taylor’s Rift Zone and Last West, Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange
“Whose fault // our fault” the poem “Three Dreams, 2018” opens. Tess Taylor’s fourth collection of poems, Rift Zone, tenders to her reader the…
We Learn the Names: a Review of Kathryn Nuernberger’s Rue
In her essay “Upstream,” Mary Oliver offers her reader a scenario of a mind oriented towards (and in, and through) nature: “When the chesty,…
Wonder and Truth
Pricking by Jessica Cuello. Tiger Bark Press, 2016. 73 pages. $16.95. I. In Jessica Cuello’s first two full-length collections of poetry, the historical past...