鈥淢att Mitchell analyzes his own identity in the 2021 debut poetry collection The Neon Hollywood Cowboy published by Big Lucks Books. The book resembles an album of music in its shape and cover art, setting up the collection鈥檚 connection to musical artists and moments in popular culture. With a missing Y chromosome but male physical characteristics, Mitchell鈥檚 intersex identity is at the forefront of the collection鈥檚 exploration of the self...鈥�
鈥淭his chapbook was heavily influenced by art and music. One of the first stories I wrote for it, 鈥淐hangeling,鈥� came about because I had seen Ren Hang鈥檚 photography on Twitter, and there was something so haunting and evocative about it that made me look into more of his work. From there, I began exploring other contemporary Chinese photographers, and I very quickly created a Pinterest board of photographs with that same vibe. 鈥�
鈥淰irginia Woolf is one of my favorite writers and I was curious about Nazifa Islam鈥檚 approach to her work. Drawing from Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves, Islam has crafted a beautiful collection...homing in on some of the central motifs from both texts to create something that is at once its own as well as in conversation with its origins.鈥�
鈥淏enjamin Gucciardi鈥檚 West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize, is filled with soulful poems of connection and meditation where attention is given to the departure from earth and the beauty that persists after such loss. The poems are structured around a speaker who communicates with their dead sister, and the absence almost forces them to find the gaps in language, to carve out a path into another realm鈥攁n entryway into the world after.鈥�
鈥淜ate Durbin鈥檚 Hoarders (Wave Books, 2021) introduces the reader to 15 different hoarders, each with their own backstories, crises, and fetishes. While each shares the same coping mechanism, and each poem lends itself to the same form, both Durbin鈥檚 craft and the subjects themselves are surprising and rich.鈥�
鈥溾�橧 Pump Milk Like a Boss鈥� was a breakthrough poem for me. I wrote it after I became a mother and hadn鈥檛 written (or rather, I had been taking notes and collecting fragments) for a year and it literally gushed out of me. It was a poem that showed me a way to bring together conflicting sides鈥攖he tenderness and broke-open feeling of new motherhood alongside the feral and urgent hunger of who I am as a poet.鈥�
鈥淭he pleasure I take in square dancing is probably the same pleasure I take in writing poems in fixed forms鈥攁 structure that feels very physical. Poems, especially patterned ones, become part of our bodies when we express them physically. They become part of us and they change us.鈥�
鈥淢ichael Kleber-Diggs鈥檚听Worldly Things听follows the murders of Black American men in America and interrogates the assumptions of what it means to be black in this country. The poems grapple with the complexities of being unseen in the black body, having a skin color that acts as a veil from oneself, and at the same time what it means to be identified by a look鈥攖o have an invisibility that is only addressed when one can be studied under a fixed description.鈥�
鈥淭hese poems, in their examination of the lives of gay men during and after the AIDS epidemic, mourn the horrors of the epidemic of the 1980s and 90s while also carrying a wistful longing for community that coalesced in response to this crisis.鈥�
鈥淚n Laura Van Prooyen鈥檚 Frances of the Wider Field, time and space are slippery things, as is memory. Memory and the mysterious Frances of the title hover over the book like glimmers and ghosts seen from the corner of the eye. The book shifts back and forth between the narrator鈥檚 childhood and her present as family members age and confront illness. Good memories and unsettling ones are recalled in concrete, memorable details, and often, the narrator wonders what they mean, simply documenting rather than attaching significance to them.鈥�
Check out these micro-reviews from contributors Mary Ardery and Claire Wahmanholm!
鈥淎n awakening, a desperate and urgent shake of the shoulders as if to disturb our numbness and, possibly, our comfort is what Eireann Lorsung offers in these poems.听The Century, Lorsung鈥檚 third poetry collection, couldn鈥檛 be any more relevant at a time of reckoning with where we are, at last, willing to look at violence and call it what it is, where white privilege and structures of oppression are understood and confronted for the threat that they are.鈥�
鈥淭o read Kirsten Kaschock鈥檚 Explain This Corpse, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, is to enter a sort of poetic matrix. These are not poems that give primacy to feeling, though they contain it. Their purpose seems not to be to perform or elicit emotion, as much as to use it as a tool to show us other truths.鈥�
鈥淪o many of the relationships I had in my twenties were so deeply tied to where I lived that the place itself feels rooted to their loss. Maybe this is why I wasn鈥檛 able to write about Tennessee until my husband left it, until it was a place of grief and, eventually, healing.鈥�
Check out these additional micro-reviews听from contributors Audrey Gidman, Sunni Brown Wilkinson, and Tryphena Yeboah!
鈥淕illian Cummings鈥檚 second full-length collection,听The Owl was a Baker鈥檚 Daughter, is many things鈥攂eautiful and musical, tender and quietly daring鈥攂ut perhaps its most dominant feature is that it is bewildering.鈥澨�
Read Amie Whittemore's full review of this collection
鈥淭he back copy for Matt Morton鈥檚 debut collection听Improvisation without Accompaniment听describes a book that traces 'the rhythms of life for a young man growing up in a small Texas town.' A reader might expect poems in this vein to tend toward the austere, sun-bleached, or washed out. Yet Morton has produced something different: more opulent, saturated, and crowded.鈥澨�
With the end of the fall 2020 semester near, check out these new micro-reviews听from contributors Carolyn Janecek, Jenna Le, and Raena Shirali!
鈥淭he far points now near, more present than the present,鈥� Rick Barot writes in the opening poem (鈥淭he Grasshopper and The Cricket鈥�) of听The Galleons,听his fourth collection, ushering readers into a richly peopled and textured collection guided by a truly curious and insightful mind: what do history鈥檚 galleons deliver to us? And what do we make of these all too often problematic gifts?
Every poem is arguably an ars poetica. In poetry, the speaker is trying to reach the emotional core and understanding of the subject(s) at hand. While the speaker embarks on this journey towards emotional clarity, the poem itself not only transforms in content, but it also transforms in definition. Poetry is constantly being reshaped, and the book-length long poem is perhaps the greatest display of this idea, as the reader is taken through countless transformations in lines.
Kathleen Graber鈥檚听The River Twice听is that rare book that makes me feel giddy even as it makes me weep鈥擨 want to soak in the poems as if in long baths, travel them as if they were rigorous hikes through undisturbed forests, bed down in their intricate nests. I want to walk up to strangers and say, you need to hear this poem (and this one and this one and oh wait I just read the book aloud to a dozen strangers). I want to review it so that you will read it and feel your own head drifting off into sun and sparrows and wind.
In Premonitions, Elizabeth Schmuhl not only arrives, but sojourns, seeking to become a physical fact of her own environment, and in turn to translate that environment for us in language both sparse and sumptuous. As she sinks into the isolation of a rural property far from human contact, her language assumes the frayed hemlines and feral tones of her setting. It is lush but lean, whimsical but unsentimental.
With the end of the fall 2019 semester closing in, check out these micro-reviews from contributors Nina Murray, David Nilsen, Ali Shapiro, and Shelley Wong!
Lethal Theater, winner of The Journal鈥檚 Charles B. Wheeler鈥檚 Poetry Prize (Mad Creek Books, 2019) is Susannah Nevison鈥檚 second poetry collection, and it鈥檚 unflinchingly critical of the American prison system. Written in three parts鈥攕imilar to the three-act style of a play, as well as the three drugs administered during an execution鈥攖he poems lead the reader through accounts of torture and experimentation on prison inmates, crescendoing with the botched execution of Claude Jones. In each section, the executioners have a role to play; the witnesses have a role to play; the condemned have a role to play, too. But putting on a good performance isn鈥檛 the same as administering justice, and sometimes, the play goes off script: an execution goes awry, or the public learns of some behind-the-scenes 鈥渨ar game鈥� they weren鈥檛 meant to see.听
鈥淚n Ashley M. Jones鈥檚 dark // thing and Julia Guez鈥檚 In an Invisible Glass Case Which is Also A Frame, both poets are in conversation with the past and its complicated inheritances, with current sociocultural trends, as well as with the self as a site of discovery; yet, their explorations are structured in remarkably different ways, making the act of reading them together marvelously evocative.鈥�
What鈥檚 the proper literary form to capture the anecdote? Beth Ann Fennelly鈥檚 newest collection, Heating & Cooling, makes the case that it is the micro-memoir鈥攖hat is, the personal essay that ranges from a single line to about six pages. If the full-length memoir is akin to the studio portrait, this collection, which contains 52 literary anecdotes, offers something like a handful of skillfully rendered charcoal sketches.
I have never wanted to be a mother and find little solace in the idea of setting up house with a domestic partner; yet, despite my psychic distance from the experiences of parenthood and partnership that ground Ada Lim贸n鈥檚听The Carrying听and Keetje Kuipers鈥檚听All Its Charms, I found both collections radically comforting as they situated domesticity, its pleasures and challenges, as feminist responses to the environmental and social threats that abound...
Read Amie's full review
With the end of the spring 2019 semester closing in, check out these micro-reviews from four different contributors!
Read 听reviews of fiction and nonfiction by Marina Benjamin, Jill Kolongowski, and Vedran Husic.
Read听听review of Jane Kenyon's听Otherwise.
Read听听reviews of poetry by Aracelis Girmay, Cathy Park Hong, and Natalie Scenters-Zapico.
Read听Nina Murray's听reviews of collections from Justin Boening and Rebecca Morgan Frank.听听
In many ways, these collections are also meditations on rendering visible the invisible parts of human experience. And, while each of these poets has a singular voice and vision, each of them renders grief, rage, and love visible through a mixture of deft lyricism, formal experimentation, and vulnerable narration. Read the Kate Tufts Discovery Award round-up.
Most of the subjects of Barber鈥檚 poems are far from beautiful, however lovely the language in which they are rendered.听Country House takes the pastoral form and shifts its gaze from the rocks and the rills to dumps and decay. The collection refuses the reader the escapist comforts of nature poetry, instead turning a soft light on what our modern ecosystem is comprised of: crumbling buildings, waste, industrial eyesores, and our engineered attempts to disguise it all as progress.
Read David Nilsen's full Country House review.
Tiana Clark鈥檚 first full length collection,听I Can鈥檛 Talk 缅北强奸 the Trees Without The Blood,听is as much about race and gender (and how they intersect) as it is about the ways language intersects with race and racism, gender and sexism, self and others: 鈥渢he most dangerous game, for me, is sex and syntax,鈥� Clark鈥檚 speaker offers in 鈥淩ituals,鈥� and, perhaps, that is because they both give birth to us: we come from sex, but we are spoken into the world, shaped by how we name the world as much as by how it names us.
Like the houseflies in the book's final poem, whose 鈥渆yes鈥�/their thousands and thousands of eyes鈥�/make a mosaic of the dark,鈥� the speaker in this book beholds a soul鈥攈er own鈥攖hat has spent long stretches of time unlit and fragmented.听
Nostalgia is a risky muse鈥攊t would be easy to erase the 鈥渁g runoff鈥� from those creeks, to see them as a child sees them鈥攕hining and sleepy. Smith, however, provides both sentiment and criticism in these narrative poems, investigating as much as cherishing 鈥渇lyover country,鈥� a term which comes to encapsulate not only the Midwestern United States, but also other landscapes and lives, raising the question: can we really know that which we 鈥渇lyover?
Read Amie's full Flyover Country review
As 2018 comes to an end, contributors Rochelle Hurt, Jenna Le, Brenna Lemieux, and David Nilsen provide thought-provoking micro reviews discussing diverse topics from motherhood to wartime and slavery. See the full 2018 round-up.
...While it seems to draw from losses in Dingman鈥檚 life鈥攈er father鈥檚 death, for instance, is a central concern, as are the complexities of motherhood, daughterhood, and womanhood鈥攖hese poems are far from confessional.听Thaw鈥檚 waters run both clear and murky. As she writes in 鈥淟ittle Hell,鈥� 鈥淚 escaped / the snow, not its secrets鈥� and these secrets are what drown Dingman鈥檚 speakers as well as what gives them hope: intimacy, which is at the center of every secret, is a wound and a salve at once.
The title poem of Diane Seuss鈥檚 2018 collection听Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl examines the eponymous painting by Rembrandt, a puzzling composition that, in Seuss鈥檚 hands, becomes compellingly complex. After fourteen lines of exploring the inner life of a small girl staring through a window at the titular fowl, the bait and switch of her life exemplified in these two dead birds in place of the pie Seuss imagines the girl had been hoping to find, we鈥檙e elbowed in the ribs with this closing sentence: 鈥淎rt, useless as tits on a boar.鈥�
When I picked up Jos Charles鈥檚听feeld, I knew nothing about it,听aside from the praise for it wafting through the poetry internet. I turned to the first poem and said to myself, 鈥淲ait, is the whole book going to be like this?鈥� 鈥淟ike this鈥� being a Chaucerian spelling of English (you鈥檇 think the title would have given me a clue, but reader, I鈥檓 often oblivious). However, I try to be game when a book invites me to confront my own limitations and privileges as a reader and a person, so I pushed through my discomfort. I鈥檓 glad I did.
Read Amie's full feeld review
There鈥檚 a special kind of pleasure that occurs when a 鈥渇irst鈥� and a 鈥渂est鈥� coincide; a first-best taste of chai ice cream; a best-first date; rarely, though, is losing one鈥檚 virginity a first that鈥檚 also best. Still, I鈥檓 jealous of everyone who gets to read听Virgin听by Analicia Sotelo for the first time because this book is part-fire, part-labyrinth, part yolk spilling from its cage.
Read Amie's full Virgin review
Heather June Gibbons鈥檚听Her Mouth as Souvenir听dazzles. The poems practically vibrate off the page as they push forward to the next observation, the next joke, the next loneliness. Gibbons examines and exploits the way language heightens and complicates perception in these poems: they are at once absurd yet grounded, sincere yet gritty. They demonstrate how language muddles as much as clarifies reality.
Read Amie's full Her Mouth as Souvenir review
In听Oceanic听(Copper Canyon Press, 2018), her fourth poetry collection, Aimee Nezhukumatathil draws on the title word in a number of waves (pun intended): in one sense, these poems听are oceanic, in that images borrowed from the sea鈥檚 riches swim through them (the puns can鈥檛 stop, won鈥檛 stop): whale sharks, coral, penguins, kelp and scallops all inhabit these poems. It is the other sense of oceanic鈥攖hat of vastness or greatness鈥攖hat Nezhukumatathil probes and pushes in these poems: what is the seed of greatness? How can we make our hearts vaster?
is the author of the poetry collection听Glass Harvest听(Autumn House Press). Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in听The Gettysburg Review,听Nashville Review,听Smartish Pace,听Pleiades, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.
