Boy with Thorn Poems by Rickey Laurentiis Pitt Press, 2015 $15.95 “There are eyes, glasses even, but still he can’t see / what the world sees seeing him.” In Rickey Laurentiis’ stunning debut collection, Boy with Thorn (winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize), readers are presented with an America where the questions are always …
When the Men Go Off to War Poems by Victoria Kelly Naval Institute Press, 2015 Hardcover, $27.95 It’s convenient to think wars are distant worlds across the sea. To think of them as containable and separate, only affecting the lives of soldiers and the towns they occupy. It’s convenient to limit the loss. But here, in …
Emmett Till in Different States Poems by Dr. Philip C. Kolin Third World Press, 2015 $18.95 A friend asked me the other day if I thought the world was ending. She was drowning in the constant-seeming reports of violence in the news, on college campuses, in the streets of major cities, violence so often targeting …
Prosthesis by Ian Hatcher Poor Claudia, 2016 $17.50 In The Question Concerning Technology German philosopher Martin Heidegger explains that technology is a framework through which man can access a higher plane of truth and understanding. However, the creation of this framework inherently conceals truth in its attempt to provide a comprehensible platform. It’s a paradoxical relationship, and Heidegger …
Brett Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs by Lina Wolff trans by Frank Perry And Other Stories, 2015 $15.95 Swedish author Lina Wolff’s debut novel is a wonderfully complex and sometimes confusing journey. The plot meanders, the prose balances grittiness with the surreal, and our ideas about gender and love are challenged. While the novel …
Ember Days by Nick Ripatrazone Alleyway Books, 2015 $16.00 COME BACK HERE. KNOW A GUY WHO CAN HELP YOU FIND THE BOMB. Ember Days opens almost immediately with this all-caps note—a message from a brother to a brother, a last-ditch effort to reunite, to collect a debt, and to repent for a wrongdoing. This is …
Waking the Bones by Elizabeth Kirschner The Piscataqua Press, 2015 $13.00 In her memoir Waking the Bones, Elizabeth Kirschner unravels the snarled strings of her life, weaving connections between her childhood traumas, her adult mental illness, and the redemptive power of self-reliance. Kirschner divides her memoir into clear sections, each of which anchors the short, …
The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected by Lynn Emanuel University of Pittsburgh Pres, 2015 $16.95 As a younger poet beginning her career, I’m interested in the process seasoned writers undergo when compiling a new and selected. Can the inclusion of older poems be likened to a band playing that first single, ten years …