You Could Learn a Lot Poems by RJ Gibson Seven Kitchens Press, 2014 $9.00 In 2006, Alice Smith crooned, “Gimme some new religion, something that I can feel.” Eight years later, RJ Gibson has answered that call. Through a blend of nature, religion, and pop culture, Gibson’s new chapbook You Could Learn a Lot depicts …
The Americans Poems by David Roderick University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014 $15.95 We can’t fence in wildness; we can’t fence out the world. It’s an old story of man’s interactions with nature and the global community. But in David Roderick’s The Americans, it’s seen through new, unflinching eyes. Here, Roderick’s strong voice and steady gaze …
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 …
On the Street of Divine Love Poems by Barbara Hamby University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014 $15.95 Hamby’s poems have been billed as “word drunk excursions into the American female consciousness,” and they certainly are; the titles of Hamby’s earlier collections Delirium, The Alphabet of Desire, Babel, and All-Night Lingo Tango …
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 …