Interstate Poems by Chard deNiord Pitt Poetry Press, 2015 $15.95 The word interstate can be defined as involving, existing between, or connecting two or more separate states. Often this links to the physical—a road we travel in our beat-up 87 Volkswagen, windows down, crossing state boarders in summer skin. But in Chard deNiord’s newest poetry …
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 …
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 …
Beautiful Zero by Jennifer Willoughby Milkweed Editions, 2015 $16.00 Today, late January, the sky opened up and let the sun break onto the snow. On top of a mountain in Claysburg, Pennsylvania, I watched as skiers peeled their clothes off; their bare skin blushed against the slopes. This moment matters, and maybe only because I …
Don’t Go Back to Sleep Poems by Timothy Liu Saturnalia, 2014 $15.00 Robert Pinsky, in his essay “Responsibilities of the Poet” says we must answer for what we see. What about what we can’t see? How do we answer for such things? In Don’t Go Back to Sleep we see Timothy Liu grapple with lasting …
Bright Dead Things Poems by Ada Limón Milkweed Editions $16.00 In 2010 a classmate handed me Limón’s first collection, lucky wreck, published by Autumn House Press, in the college dining hall. The classmate thumbed through the thin pages and pointed to her underline, the beginning of “First Lunch With Relative Stranger Mister You” which begins, …
If You Find Yourself Poems by Brian Patrick Heston Main Street Rag, 2014 $14.00 One thing Brian Patrick Heston gets right in his collection, If You Find Yourself, is how death creeps into the lives of children. How it changes them. Heston opens on this moment of change—summer around the way, “latchkey kids” in Adidas …
Do Not Rise Poems by Beth Bachmann Pitt Poetry Series, 2015 $15.95 You be the garden I leave my boots in when I walk barefoot after drought. Do to me what no one has done. These lines come from Bachmann’s poem “garden, and a gun,” a title that brings to light the collection’s most powerful …