Alone of the Wall by Alex Honnold with David Roberts W.W. Norton, 2015 Hardback: $26.95 The majority of books I review are poetry, often in translation, because I came to literary criticism via my career in translation. However, I’m also an avid athlete and one of the sports I pursue is rock climbing. While it …
Habitation Collected Poems by Sam Hamill Lost Horse Press, 2014 $25.00 Sam Hamill has had a long and diverse career as a poet, publisher, editor, and translator—his work as a translator of poetry from ancient Chinese, Japanese, and Greek alone would place him in a rare arena of those who have contributed greatly to expanding …
City of Eternal Spring Poems by Afaa Michael Weaver University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014 $15.95 City of Eternal Spring is a difficult, demanding book from the onset: however wrongly, we often tend to look for central themes and backgrounding for poets and their poetry, being too accustomed to a Chinese-American poet writing about her ethnic experience …
The Complete Kobzar: The Poetry of Taras Shevchenko Translated by Peter Fedynsky Glagoslav Publications, 2013 €20.90 Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar is perhaps the greatest—or at least best-known—work of Ukrainian literature from the classic period of romantic, independent, native Ukrainian writing. Yet despite that, it has been—in full, and not as a poem or two selected into some anthology …
The Old Priest: Stories by Anthony Wallace University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013 Hardback: $24.95 The work of a critic—be it one of literature, visual art, dance, or music or anything creative—is vexing in the sense that you have to so often set aside to a degree personal opinion while fully retaining your command of …
Birth Marks Poems by Jim Daniels BOA Editions, 2013 $16.00 “a tiny yellow leaf falls on to my red kitchen table” And with that line, I wish to open my review of the book from which it comes, Jim Daniels’ Birth Marks. This book came to me for review as part of BOA’s new …
A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton Alfred Starr Hamilton, Edited by Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal. Song Cave, 2013 reviewed by Mike Walker A poet, perhaps more than any other type of artist, can toil in total obscurity. He doesn’t need a band or a pianist to back his …
Salt Pier (Pitt Poetry Series) by Dore Kiesselbach University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012 ISBN: 978-0822962175 reviewed by Mike Walker Dore Kiesselbach brings forth in this slim volume a true, robust, and fully novel burst of poetry—an outpouring that appears like a new crop, with a lot of little things to find in the market-sized assortment …