Intimates and Fools Poems by Laura Madeline Wiseman Art by Sally Deskin Les Femmes Folles Books, 2014 $14.00 In the collaborative project Intimates and Fools, we learn 1950s’ “sex symbol,” Marilyn Monroe, slept in her bra. This is the same woman who said “beauty and femininity are ageless and can’t be contrived, and glamour, although …
Bloom in Reverse Poems by Teresa Leo University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014 $15.95 One of Immanuel Kant’s philosophical musings stands as such: it is not how we bring ourselves to understand the world, but how the world comes to be understood by us. In the aftermath of a friend’s suicide, Teresa Leo’s speaker mourns, while …
Imperial Poems by George Bilgere University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014 $15.95 The world George Bilgere represents in his sixth collection, Imperial, tight-ropes the simple with the complex. Bilgere’s voice—casual, matter-of-fact, and vaguely amused—edges at the last second with anxiety and denial. His poems, an empire of “Yard Sale,” “Fly Balls,” “Prostate Exam,” simultaneously mix with …
Pennsylvania Welcomes You Poems by Kristofer Collins CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2013 $12.00 As a Boston native living in Pittsburgh for the past five years, I’m sympathetic to the belief that a city produces hypnotic powers on the psyche, charms us, provides a geographical ‘tribe’ that continues, no matter where we’ve been, to call us to …
Now, Now Poems by Jennifer Maier University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013 $15.95 If Jennifer Maier’s second full-length collection, Now, Now, was likened to a type of candy it would be a Hershey’s Special Dark. I say this based on accurate metaphor, not hunger. On first chew, Maier’s poems are delicate, quiet, deliberately fond with a …