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In Ephemera, winged creatures elegize and celebrate the beauty of evanescence simultaneously. The poems speak to the ambivalence of coming of age beset by the daily trials of chronic illness as viewed through the lens of femininity and love in the confessional tradition. Odysseus Difficult to divine how you arrived, not water-doused or mail-slotted to me, but whole in your stone-centered gaze, almost tired out by your ninety days under stars. Satisfied by none, you chose me to be your canary, waiting, green with hope for your return. Coming home from the back-woods, you made me into your mooring, fashioned yourself into a pilgrim to my bed’s unmade shrine. I’ll make a Ulysses out of you yet. Yes, the butterfly kind, blue body mild as the Aegean, crushing. I will weave our dreams together: never go back to sea without me as your mate.
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Christine Kitano’s Dumb Luck & other poems offers a portrait of a thirty-something Asian American woman who finds herself living in the relative safety of upstate New York before and during the pandemic. In one poem the speaker reflects on current events (the ongoing pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests, the surge in anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S.) and contrasts these with the peace of rural New York, wondering, “Is this / the reward for good luck, just a more / comfortable survival?” The poems in this collection orbit around this question, providing both lyric and narrative explorations on luck, guilt, and survival. Ultimately, these poems delve into how the otherwise mundane questions of selfhood and identity for a gendered and racialized body take on greater urgency during times of increased social unrest, panic, and violence. Winner of The 2023 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize, selected by Alison Pelegrin.
Selena Didn't Know Spanish Either is a debut poetry collection which seeks Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla as a means of reconnecting to the speaker’s cultural identity. As Spanish language and culture becomes more accessible to non-Latinx populations, the speaker grapples with her own complex story of assimilation. Modern marginalization, appropriation, tokenizing, and fetishizing are examined in this multi-generational memoir tracking a Latinx family’s journey to assimilation. This dynamic collection is far-reaching, exploring BIPOC experiences in predominantly white cultures. from “Young Memoir” di·as·po·ra is silent. is spiritual. It is being robbed of memoir while you sleep in a suburb. it is nonconsensually sensual—it is a question. when it comes for you, what will you recover? what will you do to reclaim all that was forced lost?
Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro's el creacionismo ("Creationism")-conceived circa 1912-holds that a new object of the imagination is universally translatable because its substance is free of all laws that would otherwise govern its meaning. Transnational, multilingual, extradisciplinary-el creacionismo fomented a body of work that remains essential to understanding the poet's visionary, disruptive role in a world increasingly destabilized by the insularity of human technique. El Creacionismo collects Jonathan Simkins widely published and acclaimed English translations alongside Huidobro's original Spanish texts in a new bilingual edition, with a foreword by Leo Lobos.
The poems of My Wilderness often take place on the wooded hillside in Oregon where Maxine Scates has lived since the mid-1970s. They chronicle how the woods, which were once a refuge, have turned into a landscape of change where trees once numerous are now threatened by storm and the presence of the humans who live among them. These poems also engage her partner’s threatening illness, the death of her closest friend, and the death, at age one hundred, of her mother, an indomitable figure who led Scates through a working-class childhood in Los Angeles fraught with domestic violence. Grounded in the shifting borders of migrations and extinctions plant, animal, and human, of memory and grief, My Wilderness inevitably asks us to consider not only our own mortality but also our impact on the world around us. Excerpt from “Dear Maple” Nothing will save you now unless the small branches sprouting like a halo from your eight-foot stump take hold. The young women at the Farmer’s Market are already selling the most beautiful turnips, glowing like pearls, and all spring the swale of camas shone blue in the morning light. How can any of us know what will save us?
“When an author’s unmitigated brilliance shows up on every page, it’s tempting to skip a description and just say, Read this! Such is the case with this breathlessly powerful, deceptively breezy book of poetry.” —Booklist, Starred Review In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.
2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award - Poetry Honorable Mention 2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award - Grand Prize Short List 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominee The Crown Ain't Worth Much, Hanif Abdurraqib's first full-length collection, is a sharp and vulnerable portrayal of city life in the United States. A regular columnist for MTV.com, Abdurraqib brings his interest in pop culture to these poems, analyzing race, gender, family, and the love that finally holds us together even as it threatens to break us. Terrance Hayes writes that Abdurraqib "bridges the bravado and bling of praise with the blood and tears of elegy." The poems in this collection are challenging and accessible at once, as they seek to render real human voices in moments of tragedy and celebration.