You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Reading itself is travel in Derek Gromadzki’s first book, Pilgrimage Suites, an outing across an insular medieval landscape as rich in its registers of language as in its flora or fauna. This book is neither history nor story, though it retains characteristics of each. Like history, it perpetuates retrograde speculation while maintaining the narrated sequencing of incident that is the common stock and trade of story. In the heyday of medieval pilgrimages, English underwent radical changes. The Latinate speech of Church officialdom ran roughly up against a vernacular with deep Germanic and Brythonic roots. These suites track an imagined journey over the landscape that staged the violence of...
The Republic of Song is a journey to discover the place of that name, moving through abhorrence to vision. The political chicanery of barely believable figures is excoriated and set against a world where Orpheus holds sway, friendship outstares death, Nina Simone is happy and Jack Spicer sends us a message about daddy Zeus president. In The Republic of Song everything is changed and the lyric states its claim in the face of exile. The Republic of Song is also that place where having a drink with a friend in a bar in Brussels can unlock part of the story and prompt the freedom of seeing things for what they are. In the conclusive poem, “The Museum of the Sea,” the supposedly distant past is alive in the present and deep time is now, Odysseus is at sea with the victims of the migrant crisis, everything is new and nothing is new.
The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson is designed to engage, inform, interest, and delight students and scholars of Emily Dickinson, of nineteenth-century US literature and cultural studies, of American poetry, and of the lyric. It also establishes potential agendas for future work in the field of Dickinson studies. This is the first collection on Dickinson to foreground the material and social culture of her time while opening new windows to interpretive possibility in ours. The volume strives to balance Dickinson's own center of gravity in the material culture and historical context of nineteenth-century Amherst with the significance of important critical conversations of our present, thu...
Christopher Sindt’s System and Population returns to the primary theme of Sindt’s earlier collection, The Bodies: the impact of human desire on the natural world. System and Population focuses on the proposed damming of the American River canyon in northern California—working with source texts such as geologic studies, government documents, and the diaries of gold miners—to study the intersections of personal experience, scientific study, and the politics of rivers and dams. It is a personal eco-poetics that embraces the tradition of the lyric, experimenting with collage and the explicit inclusion of historic and scientific data. System and Population meditates on human experiences, such as parenthood and loss, and also studies the dissociative effects of environmental damage and disaster
Bobbing alongside Margery Kempe—an illiterate medieval mystic who dictated the first autobiography in English—the ragged voice of Cry Baby Mystic finds itself drawn into strange predicaments that are not its own and ferried into abandoned spaces by the gearing of stardom and shame. The revolving sentences overheard by the reader--a muffled chorus of Brechtian aftershocks--survive only as traces of sorrow now craved by all who have known it: sound gossiping the unsound, the excess of the pilgrim. A person climbs out and never comes home.
Alias is Eric Pankey’s second collection of prose poems from Free Verse Editions. The first, Dismantling the Angel, won the New Measure Poetry Prize. Pankey continues to investigate the flexibility and possibility of this literary genre, the prose poem, which Hermaine Riffaterre says has “an oxymoron for a name.” H. L. Hix has praised Pankey’s prose poems for their “elusive and luminous sentences” and how they “take the shape of fire.” Kevin Prufer has celebrated their meditations “on mystery, human sympathy, and the divine.” Cynthia Marie Hoffman says of these new poems, “One has the sense that Pankey sees beyond the visible, or sees both the visible and the invisible at once.”
In The Visible Woman, Allison Funk writes of how women often disappear into the roles expected of them, becoming invisible to themselves. To fill in “the thin / chalk outline” of herself that she’s “drawn and erased” for as long as she can remember, Funk returns to the anatomical model of “The Visible Woman” she left unassembled as a child. With poems rather than the kit’s plastic organs and bones, she strives to “create a likeness / to embody herself.” In her efforts at self-representation, the poet is guided by the visual artist Louise Bourgeois— her real-life model of a woman who proved that art gives us a way of recognizing ourselves.
This is a book about a color—the vivid, explosive yellow of the English broom that blooms outrageously, uproariously, all over the mountain that dominates the view from Nicolas Pesquès' window. In this loping long poem, Pesquès views this color as installation art—as if the word YELLOW were written in enormous letters covering the hillside. It's an installation that brings issues of language to the fore, offering an occasion for the writer to juggle the immediate presence of color with the more mitigated presence created by language.
In Ghost Letters, one emigrates to America again, and again, and again, though one also never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; one grows up in America, and attends university in America, though one also never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; one wrestles with one’s American blackness in ways not possible in Senegal, though one never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; and one sees more deeply into Americanness than any native-born American could. Ghost Letters is a 21st century Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, though it is a notebook of arrival and being in America. It is a major achievement. —Shane McCrae
"Hannah Craig's This History That Just Happened places the reader at the nexus where rural and city life converge, bridging a world personal and political, natural and artful, in a voice always uniquely hers. Every word here is earned. And little, if anything, escapes this poet's heart, mind, or eye. History works through a keen imagination. These poems make us feel and listen differently, and images coalesce line by line and dare us to reside where fierce empathy and beauty abide."—Yusef Komunyakaa