Category: Barrett Warner

Book Review: The Devil’s Snake Curve
by Josh Ostergaard

By | Barrett Warner, Book Review, Prose

The Devil’s Snake Curve by Josh Ostergaard Coffee House Press, 2014 $16.00 At first glance, former urban anthropologist Josh Ostergaard has written a love story. There’s nostalgia, great passion, cheating, impenetrable beauty, and remorse. There’s reunion, resignation, and heroic angels. And lots of hot dogs. Ostergaard comfortably puts down six in a nine inning span. …

Book Review: The Earth Avails by Mark Wunderlich

By | Barrett Warner, Book Review, Prose

The Earth Avails Poems by Mark Wunderlich Graywolf Press, 2014 $15.00 God appears to be making a comeback. Six months ago Flannery O’Connor’s spiritual journal was unveiled in The New Yorker. The break came on the heels of former child evangelist Terry Lucas’ If They Have Ears to Hear (Southeast Missouri State University Press), and …

Book Review: Talisman by Lisa C. Krueger

By | Barrett Warner, Book Review, Poetics, Prose

Talisman Poems by Lisa C. Krueger Red Hen Press, 2014 $17.95 A few summers ago, the Saratoga Racing Tip Sheet on Lisa Krueger noted: “Goes a few places. Moves away from the obvious. Sometimes needs to look back over her shoulder to make sure the reader is following.” Big bettors may wish to read Krueger’s …

Book Review: Girl at the Watershed by Nicola Waldron

By | Barrett Warner, Book Review, Poetics, Prose

Girl at the Watershed Poems by Nicola Waldron Stepping Stone Press $12 You’d expect a little vertigo from a poet who migrated from the berries and cream at Cambridge to the red eye gravy of South Carolina. The speaker in Nicola Waldron’s poems in Girl at the Watershed is ever on the move, but even …

Book Review: Drift by Alan King

By | Barrett Warner, Book Review, Poetics, Prose

Drift Poems by Alan King Willow Books, 2012 $15.00   The acknowledgments page is standing room only in Alan King’s debut collection of poems, Drift. In fact it’s two pages long, which might say a lot about King’s gratitude, but climbing aboard these poems (each one is a train car) the first thing I noticed …

Book Review: Night Moves by Stephanie Barber

By | Barrett Warner, Book Review, Poetics, Prose

Night Moves by Stephanie Barber Publishing Genius Press, 2013 $10.00   We’re a nation of critics and deciders—folks hired for their opinions rather than physical labor. One of the pleasures of nonobjective painting is that the role of the critic in defining contemporary art becomes obsolete. The artist—photographer Linda Conner in the Seventies, or painter …

Book Review: Puerto Rico By Alejandro Ventura

By | Barrett Warner, Book Review, Prose

Puerto Rico By Alejandro Ventura Brooklyn Arts Press, 60 pages, $15 ISBN-13: 978-1-936767-15-1 When it comes to oceanic feelings, novelists reach for fishing poles and poets reach for binoculars. Being the latter, I’ve spent my life trying to find a pile of dirt in the high seas. I want to build a fire on it. …

Book Review: Big Ray

By | Barrett Warner, Book Review, Prose

Big Ray By Michael Kimball Bloomsbury, 185 pages, $23, ISBN: 978-1-60819-854-2 Most metaphors weigh a few ounces. Big Ray weighs five hundred pounds. He isn’t the sort of metaphor that fits through a window. Think grand piano. And we’re talking dead weight, not live weight, so right away we know that all of Michael Kimball’s …