All That Yellow Poems by Chuck Kinder Low Ghost Press, 2014 $8.00 Kinder’s debut poetry collection All That Yellow studies the “last spoke of yellowish, old-timey photograph light alone.” These poems remind me of the saying the more we remember something, the more we forget. Kinder preserves memories, crafts poems that travel wide spaces of …
Pictograph Poems by Melissa Kwasny Milkweed Editions, 2015 $16.00 While reading the prose poems in Melissa Kwasny’s Pictograph, I was often reminded of Andrew Grace’s most recent effort, Sancta, another book of prose poems set in a specific natural place. Whereas Sancta sticks to a strict word count of seventy words, Pictograph’s poems tend to …
I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast Poems by Melissa Studdard Saint Julian Press, 2014 $12.00 There is a universe inside each instant—if ever a writer has taken that statement to heart, it’s Melissa Studdard. Her fourth book, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, turns a keen eye on life’s smallest moments to pay homage to …
Domestic Garden Poems by John Hoppenthaler Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015 $15.95 John Hoppenthaler’s Domestic Garden begins with a ghost switching the names of roses in a garden, and ends with a speaker at a Chinese buffet who’s “given in…to desire so that [he] might die fat in your arms.” In between, we encounter boy …
Mid-April, I received my yearly Travelers car insurance bill. It was nearly two hundred dollars higher than it was last year. I’d had no claims or speeding tickets on my 2011 Honda Fit which only I drive. Nothing had changed, I thought, until I phoned my agent who informed me that because my divorce was …
Easiest If I Had A Gun by Michael Gerhard Martin Alleyway Books, 2014 $16.00 If I’ve ever encountered a title that instantly sets the tone for a story collection, it’s “Shit Weasel is Late for Class.” The first tale in Easiest If I Had a Gun is an angry, bitter story of self-loathing from the mouth of a bullied …
Few cities have the audience for an entire festival of contemporary dance, yet Pittsburgh has arrived on the national scene as a place for this lesser known performing art to grow. Now, in its sixth year, newMoves is thriving with local and national dancers, and viewers from various artistic and non-artistic backgrounds. Program C of …
Wanting It Poems by Diana Whitney Harbor Mountain Press, 2014 $15.00 Whitney ends the second section of her four-section collection, Wanting It, with these lines: My fear? …that the room keeps me safe and boils me down, makes me an offer of soup-bone, ash. That I’ll never leave here. That I’ll leave. As someone who …