Many years ago PBS ran a series of television shows about American poetry called Voices & Visions. Each episode focused on one great American poet, and I think that name, Voices & Visions sums up nicely what poetry becomes about for each of us who write it. Voice and vision share a symbiotic relationship within …
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 …
Boy with Thorn Poems by Rickey Laurentiis Pitt Press, 2015 $15.95 “There are eyes, glasses even, but still he can’t see / what the world sees seeing him.” In Rickey Laurentiis’ stunning debut collection, Boy with Thorn (winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize), readers are presented with an America where the questions are always …
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 …
Emmett Till in Different States Poems by Dr. Philip C. Kolin Third World Press, 2015 $18.95 A friend asked me the other day if I thought the world was ending. She was drowning in the constant-seeming reports of violence in the news, on college campuses, in the streets of major cities, violence so often targeting …
She sits on the splintered wooden steps, alone. The smell of wet canvas Mixes with a breeze off the lake. Behind her, six cots, Striped mattresses cottony and thick. She lays out her plaid sleeping bag, Dislodges a scab and brings it to her mouth, watches them retreat: Mother, stepfather, stray younger siblings. Her little …
I try a bleached bird-bone, a rutted nail, my grandmother’s spoon ring uncurled in fire, a sharp pine-needle waxed in resin, the slim spine of his favorite book, until he cries. I ask the wimpled ghosts if the key is a word to place it on my tongue, please, place it here. Megan …
Prosthesis by Ian Hatcher Poor Claudia, 2016 $17.50 In The Question Concerning Technology German philosopher Martin Heidegger explains that technology is a framework through which man can access a higher plane of truth and understanding. However, the creation of this framework inherently conceals truth in its attempt to provide a comprehensible platform. It’s a paradoxical relationship, and Heidegger …