Big Ray By Michael Kimball Bloomsbury, 185 pages, $23, ISBN: 978-1-60819-854-2 Most metaphors weigh a few ounces. Big Ray weighs five hundred pounds. He isn’t the sort of metaphor that fits through a window. Think grand piano. And we’re talking dead weight, not live weight, so right away we know that all of Michael Kimball’s …
Could You Be with Her Now Jen Michalski Dzanc, 2013 Reviewed by Barrett Warner Jen Michalski may have been listening when Nikki Giovanni spoke how the internet—how social media—was turning us into extroverted hermits. The shy Maryland author runs the biggy-sized literary platform JMWW. The site totes some 1,000 hits a day thanks to Michalski’s …
Engaging in Life with Barrett Warner, Associate Editor of Free State Review By Nicole Bartley At first glance, you may not believe that a man who raises horses at his farm in Maryland’s Gunpowder watershed is also a poetry editor for a literary magazine. Yet Maryland’s new biannual literary magazine, Free State Review, saw both …
The History of Permanence by Gary Fincke Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2011 Reviewed by Barrett Warner The Susquehanna is an old river. Kerouac called it “the mighty ghost of the East.” At 440 miles, it’s the longest river to drain into the Atlantic Ocean. That’s a lot of haunt, but author Gary Fincke doesn’t …
Drucilla Wall, The Geese at the Gates Salmon Poetry, December, 2011 ISBN 978-1-907056-59-8 Reviewed by Barrett Warner The search for truth and beauty is a panic for dreamers. Try heading north from native Creek country, turn left at Philadelphia. Keep more or less straight to Wyoming, then dog-leg back to Nebraska. Pick up the big …
Melissa Broder Meat Heart Publishing Genius Press, 2012 There are only eighty-eight keys on a piano and the best of us only have three simple chords to our lives—work, love, and play—but music is not made of math. Neither is poetry. Still we take some risk in making art from our confessions. The narrative that …