There are many charms in reading a writer’s selected poems, not least of which is perspective. The reader feels like an airplane passenger watching one landscape turn into another. It is possible see where the plains cede to foothills... Read More

The first poem of this collection ends with the line “Hence, my confusion,” a witty rejoinder to the prose poem that contains it and an apt introduction to everything that follows. As the title suggests, the poet’s quest is... Read More

In this volume, the author adds a new name to the catalogue of women immortalized in poetry. In response to Homer’s Helen and Shakespeare’s wired-haired mistress, Allen offers Suzi, a debt-riddled coed whose beauty elates and... Read More

This is an appropriate poet to carry on the tradition of Walt Whitman. The poems in this first collection may not contain “barbaric yawps,” but they certainly speak authoritatively. In “Self-Portrait as Miranda,” the speaker... Read More

This poet gets right to the point in her latest collection. The first poem begins, “I am translating the world,” an ambitious goal, to say the least, but also an ars poetica applicable to most poets. And lest any reader have the... Read More

Unwieldy and heavy, promising as much backache as discovery, the poetry anthology is a staple of the college classroom. It is difficult to imagine such a text being as enjoyable as it is educational, but recently the anthology has gotten... Read More

There is an appropriate sense of wonder in Keith Harvey’s debut collection of poems "Petroglyphs". In line after line the poet appears to be discovering the world anew and making up the answers as he goes. In “Wille zur Macht”... Read More

In her latest collection of poems, "Twigs and Knucklebones", Sarah Lindsay revels in the pleasure of being omniscient. Writer and reader alike enjoy the privilege of superhuman knowledge in poems that blur the line between the apocryphal... Read More