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""What will be possible / when I'm no longer sorry?" asks the speaker of THE LAST UNKILLABLE THING after the sudden death of a parent. "What do lost daughters burst into?" In this debut collection by Emily Pittinos, the speaker is tasked with relearning the ways of loneliness, family, sex, and wilderness as a person who feels thoroughly and abruptly without. Shaped by both concision and unfolding sequences, THE LAST UNKILLABLE THING is a journey across landscapes of mourning where "in [the] periphery, every shadow / is a new dead thing." The light of these poems takes on the tint of grief, and through that light the speaker reexamines what remains: her changed self, her desire, the midwestern flora, the unyielding snow. Interior and exterior ecologies blur until loss becomes a place of its own, and the only inevitability. "Doesn't it hurt," Pittinos writes, "to be human. I'm so human, I could die.""--
“Sit and stay a while in the strangely familiar rooms and landscapes that Monica Berlin’s Elsewhere, That Small constructs for us. Let Berlin stop the clock, just for a few seconds, so we can take stock of “the ordinary seen & seen / -through” of our day: a doorframe warped by humidity or an over-pruned tree. Here, we weather cycles of loss and recovery; here, we dwell in the contrary senses of belonging and longing to be elsewhere. Berlin’s beautifully structured and incisive poems ask us to face—and to marvel at—the brute force of the world’s ongoingness. More so, Elsewhere, That Small offers a lesson on how to region here—that is, how to accept, how to endure.” —EMIL...
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The Vault is a quiet and vulnerable sequence of ethereal fragments, letters, and poems that trace a narrative of love and healing in the afterlife of a parent’s death. Seasons turn and a life is built despite the ruin. Each poem is a music box of prayer, of the decisions made and yet to be made.
"A collection of original poetry in three parts"--
The Miraculous Courageous is a fractured epic, a sequence which seeks not to explain but to evoke the mind of one boy and his experience with autism. In the tradition of Carson's Autobiography of Red, Booton constructs a landscape both familiar and uncanny, a territory where our inner workings burn with the luminosity of jellyfish and "darkness turns the lighthouse on." These poems are agile, slippery, glancing at the camera then quickly away, skewing the boundaries between lyric and monologue, vignette and scene. These poems are a bridge. And through their deft conflation of inner and outer worlds, the self and the other, The Miraculous Courageous marks a rich and startling immersion in the mind of autism.
Sara Lupita Olivares’s Migratory Sound, winner of the 2020 CantoMundo Poetry Prize, looks back to generational narratives of Mexican American migration, examining linguistic and geographic boundaries as it journeys north along routes of seasonal fieldwork and factory labor. “Whether enacting a bird migration, or the uprooting of people relocating north, or the private movement from sleep to alert vigilance,” series editors Carolina Ebeid and Carmen Giménez Smith observe, “Olivares’s stark poetry concerns the precarious idea of place and its underlying ‘unplace.’ She makes evident how every place bears a relationship with an elsewhere, an over there sometimes situated underneath.”
A thief-turned-saint, killed by an insult. A rabbi burning down his world in order to save it. A man who lost his sanity while trying to fathom the origin of the universe. A beautiful woman battling her brother’s and her husband’s egos to preserve their family. Stories such as these enliven the pages of the Talmud, the great repository of ancient wisdom that is one of the sacred texts of the Jewish people. Comprised of the Mishnah, the oral law of the Torah, and the Gemara, a multigenerational metacommentary on the Mishnah dating from between 3950 and 4235 (190 and 475 CE), the Talmud presents a formidable challenge to understand without scholarly training and study. But what if one appr...
Leanna Petronella’s The Imaginary Age is an unwaveringly confident debut collection and an exciting contribution to contemporary poetry. This collection does not invite us but compels us to look with the poet, as Petronella addresses the female body and female relationships with rare candor and emotional resonance. This collection is remarkable in its lyrical precision as well as its unique command of narrative, which together reveal a storyteller whose power is speaking aloud what has been deemed unspeakable. Her stories are of loss, yet Petronella refuses to romanticize grief, choosing instead to highlight the many guises and contours of grief’s ugliness. Petronella’s speakers are therefore appropriate in their disgust, their suspicion of meaning, even as the poet herself tries to make meaning through language, acknowledging its limits as well as its freedoms along the way—and taking head-on the underlying fear of both the poet and the aggrieved that “this is something / I can’t turn into something else.”