Drucilla Wall, The Geese at the Gates Salmon Poetry, December, 2011 ISBN 978-1-907056-59-8 Reviewed by Barrett Warner The search for truth and beauty is a panic for dreamers. Try heading north from native Creek country, turn left at Philadelphia. Keep more or less straight to Wyoming, then dog-leg back to Nebraska. Pick up the big …
Sense by Arslan Khasavov translated from the Russian by Arch Tait Moscow: GLAS Publishers, 2012 reviewed by Mike Walker The reputation of Russian literature in the West has long centered around the greats of the distant past—Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy—with little thought given, it seems, to the writers of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. Certainly, …
by John Samuel Tieman another Monday again I surrender to the whisper of snow My wife is reading Freud this evening. I sweep the fireplace, the ashes from Sunday more interesting for what they were. Phoebe says something I don’t quite catch, something about desire. I stare out our picture window. …
Melissa Broder Meat Heart Publishing Genius Press, 2012 There are only eighty-eight keys on a piano and the best of us only have three simple chords to our lives—work, love, and play—but music is not made of math. Neither is poetry. Still we take some risk in making art from our confessions. The narrative that …
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 Edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser Introduction by Toni Morrison BOA Editions, 2012 ISBN: 978-1934414903 More often than not, when BOA Editions sends me a book for review it comes in a modest package as it is commonly a small book—a single monograph of new poetry …
Blood Honey Poems by Chana Bloch Autumn House Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2009, 85 pages, $14.95 paper Blood Honey is a book filled with moving poems by a poet who has been a translator of important poets since she was a young woman. Her own poems are lush and vivid. One never finishes a poem wishing …
We no longer love you, boss, but the reason – it’s just hard to tell; though there’s one thing we know, and we can tell this full well – we’d all love to smash your ass, boss. _____
Animal Eye by Paisley Rekdal University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012 ISBN: 978-0822961796 Paisley Rekdal’s Animal Eye has been described as “pastoral” by a literary critic in the press release that came along with my review copy of the book, and while that’s a very good place to start with this volume it’s not an all-encompassing …