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This Someone I Call Stranger, by James Diaz, is absolutely transcendent. Diaz's evocative and courageous writing conjures up cinematic imagery with heartbreaking vulnerability and unpretentious strength. Reading his poetry, I could feel myself leaning in, yearning alongside him for such things as the affirmation of love, beauty, and release in the face of brokenness, loss, and pain. Diaz's poems will make you feel deeply. His poems will make you want to write, even if you're not a writer. His poems will make you look at your world through a new lens, see and feel things through a bigger, perhaps broken, yet wide-open heart. Kym Tuvim In our era of irony, disposability, and impatience, the po...
John Deming creates poetry from the bizarreness that is contemporary American news. His deadpan mindfulness and avant-garde wordplay incorporate newspaper headlines in a way that creates meaning out of our current political and cultural climate, often reflecting the difference between reality and surrealism-a distinction that is crucial today.
Dante Micheaux's superb poetic aptitude is wedded to an eually superb poetic amplitude. Intimate soliloquy, lyric address, and linguistic allegory merge with resonating voices and personae. This poem is masterful, paradoxical and spiritual. The "holiness in all its unholy rejoicing" is variously scored in Dante Micheaux's commanding Circus. --TERRANCE HAYES I still stand by words I wrote almost twenty years ago, when I read Dante Micheaux's poems for the first time: "I am impressed by the serious depth and masterful technique of Micheaux's poems. He is a true man of the world, mature beyond his years, one whose voracious intelligence and richly diverse background uniquely equip him for the l...
Sarah Sarai's Geographies of Soul and Taffeta takes place in a universe where the real and the unreal meet each other in a careful, ecstatic dance, where words melt into their partners and opposites, and Yin and Yang swirl together like the best kind of soft serve ice cream. The ideas and images here are exact, surprising, and often humorous: in fact, Sarai's poems strike new ground in being intelligent and far reaching while maintaining an air of humility and matter of factness. --Christine Hamm The poems in Sarah Sarai's Geographies of Soul and Taffeta are little transgressions, butterflies a-wing. They present a poetry of surprise. Don't expect candy (though there might be some); don't ex...
Reading Was Body provided a jolt I didn't realize I needed. Using tropes of iteration and erasure, medical mythologies, nude portraiture, phantasmagoria, and "theme and variation" on phrases ranging from "cellar door" to "lighter fluid," Billie R. Tadros bewitches us with language's associative properties. Fun House Mirror Sonnets? Here. The emotional semantics of Hollandaise sauce? Here. These are poems of loss and reckoning; yet these nimble poems also claim life, in tooth and claw, and the possibilities of love. "A Ferris wheel spelling/appellations," a speaker observes, "bulb color." I'm grateful to take the ride. --Sandra Beasley It feels dangerous to build an entire collection around a...
These terse lyrics engage the reader with humor, brio, and bite. In these wildly imaginative poems, Karen Hildebrand reminds us of the strangeness of the everyday and the pleasure in those ripe moments when past and present buckle and overlap. Funny, fervent, and fierce, Crossing Pleasure Avenue is also delightfully profound.
Don Yorty
Poetry. "I fingered the contours of the trunk, pondering the novelty of the spaces formed at the places where the grooves of my skin met the grooves of the bark, from its base to its branches. branch: a something, another way to explain what happened to us, to him, when he left-growth."--Billie R. Tadros
When can you tell a book of poems is really working? For me, it's when the poems provide revolutions on themes--like the tiniest clink of a kaleidoscope. Look at how Adam Zhou recognizes what stays with us, how "the landscape will remain sullen / still dressed in a sullen light" and yet the people are always leaving and returning, wounded or memory or truly breathing, even in stillness. Zhou's lyrics are a personal history unfolding before us. In a world where poems can shatter us in the best way, In Taking Apart a Kaleidoscope reminds us that "there's something new if your heart hasn't stopped"--that we must dissect whatever comes up and hold it to light. --Carly Joy Miller In Taking Apart ...
49 million years ago, the ancestors of modern whales left their terrestrial habitat to embrace the unknown perils of an ocean-based existence. In this new poetry collection, Jenna Le reflects with wit and lyricism on the ways that whales and other fauna, fish, and fowl are defined by their predecessors' immigrant narratives, slyly prodding readers to think about what these animal kingdom anecdotes might have to teach us about the complexities of life for human immigrant families and their descendants. In doing so, she speaks in multiple voices, expressing myriad perspectives, including but not limited to her personal perspective as a second-generation Asian-American descended from Vietnam War refugee parents. She also brings her unusual life experiences as a physician to bear on her storytelling, resulting in a book of verse steeped in the aromas not only of sea salt and ambergris, but also of blood and sweat and antiseptic, love and life and death.