My Friend Ken Harvey Poems by Barrett Warner Publishing Genius Press, 2014 $7.00 Nostalgia and sentiment were dirty words in poetry until Barret Warner’s My Friend Ken Harvey came on the scene. Here we have a chapbook that shows us the many forms of love, how relationships can be measured as “not enough war or …
Give us poems that speak to today’s issues. How often have you heard editors and critics dine out on that rhetoric? That false rhetoric exposes a fundamental flaw in their understanding of poetry. Poetry, like all art, is the news of the day. It is the cutting edge of our sensibility, whether it talks about Ted Cruz’s latest loony tune or the horrors …
Crow-Work Poems by Eric Pankey Milkweed Editions, 2015 $16.00 Pankey’s collection begins with the ominously titled, “Ash.” Ashes are inscrutable remains, something that shows that there was a previous form, but reveals little about that form. “At the threshold of the dive, how to know/but indirectly,” the poem begins, establishing this theme of inscrutability. Pankey …
With only one remaining performance next month, the Pittsburgh Dance Council season is officially winding down. On Saturday night at the Byham Theater, Pontus Lidberg Dance brought uniqueness to an eclectic lineup. Lidberg is a Swedish choreographer and filmmaker whose dance work has garnered attention since the company’s debut in 2011. Lidberg’s experience in film …
Last week mid-March, at my condominium committee meeting, I became aware that more than half the committee members had no way to discuss landscape planting decisions because they had no nouns to identify even the common names of any trees, bushes, or plants. What they readily admitted was that as they walk though Gateway Park …
The Spirit Bird by Kent Nelson University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014 $24.95 The line between reality and imagination is very thin in The Spirit Bird by Kent Nelson. This collection of short stories, told from both first and third person point of view, looks at the inner demons within all of us, the beautiful landscapes …
Island of a Thousand Mirrors by Nayomi Munaweera St. Martin’s Press, 2014 $24.99 Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, has received rave reviews since its initial release in Sri Lanka back in 2012. It’s been published in the United States less than a year, and already its prestige is noted by award-winning …
Day Unto Day Poems by Martha Collins Milkweed Editions, 2014 $16.00 This April, the Internet will be flooded with legions of poets writing a poem a day for National Poetry Writing Month. Whether or not you decide to answer the NaPoWriMo call, you might do well to pick up Martha Collins’s sixth full-length collection, Day …