The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards Poems by Rachel Mennies Goodmanson Texas Tech University Press, 2014 $17.95 Faith is a lineage: cultural, familial, political, a heritage in some ways inescapable. This is by no means a new idea, but that doesn’t stop Rachel Mennies Goodmanson from exploring it in active, surprising ways in her …
Interrobang Poems by Jessica Piazza Red Hen Press $17.95 Jessica Piazza’s debut collection, Interrobang, begins with fear—specifically melophobia, the fear of music. But from the poem’s first few lines, it’s clear that this fear isn’t of just any music: They’ll tell you there are only two ways: flawed windpipes that knock like water mains behind …
Little Heretic Poems by Gerry LaFemina Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2014 $18.00 Oh how desire can make us feel/ like gods and beasts both… —“Papyrus” I think it’s generally true that good poetry is born of obsession: an unavoidable exploration of those subjects, people, and memories that we writers can’t turn away …
The Holy Ghost People A Play in Verse by Joshua Young Plays Inverse Press, 2013 $12.95 The power of drama is that it plays back to us the human condition in a way that, while not always wholly realistic, seems just real enough for us to understand and absorb. Add to that the connotative meaning-making …
The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog Poems by Alicia Suskin Ostriker University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014 $15.95 “A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing,” said Gertrude Stein. Alicia Suskin Ostriker borrows those words for the epigraph of her newest poetry collection The Old …
The River Underneath the City Poems by Scott Silsbe Low Ghost Press, 2013 $10.00 In August of 2012, my mother drove me across the state of Pennsylvania from Bergen County, New Jersey. We were headed for my new apartment in Pittsburgh. Mom had no clue what to expect. What would this timeworn city have to …
The Chapel of Inadvertent Joy Poems by Jeffery McDaniel University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013 $15.95 The first Jeffrey McDaniel poem I ever read was “The Quiet World,” originally published in his 1998 collection The Forgiveness Parade. I found it in the Poetry Foundation’s archive and only read it in isolation—appropriate, perhaps, since silence and …