Book Review
Lonely Women Make Good Lovers
It’s not easy being Keetje—so truthstakingly, heartgapingly, cliffedgingly vulnerable and live. The experience of her poetry feels dangerous, capable of triggering changes both lasting and longed for. That she recognizes love as...
Book Review
In the Bone-Cracking Cold
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the least-populated region in the lower 48. Walking a riverbank, you are more likely to meet a black bear, wolf, bobcat, or whitetail deer than you are a human—which is why M. Bartley Seigel calls the UP...
Book Review
Dog and Moon
If you walk long enough to see your hair turn gray, fending brush from your face through starless nights, note taking to the cadence of seasons, your poetry will reach great heights—that is, if Kelly Shepherd’s modus operandi holds...
Book Review
Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower
Trifle, in poet speak, refers to what doesn’t make the cut, to all of the musings and ideas that are deemed unworthy—why bother? Trifle, in other words, offers a wonderful window into a poets head and what they care to keep top of...
Book Review
We Contain Landscapes
Neuroscientists speculate that humans might have thirty or more senses, and we speculate that Patrycja Humienik’s acute sense of longing for a place that no longer exists on a map affects the way she perceives all the others. She is an...
Book Review
Cowboy Park
For queer Latinx Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, raised in El Paso by Mexican immigrants, piecing together a suitable cloak of masculinity is as much about survival as it is identity. His brother’s detainment and deportation serves as a...
Book Review
House of Grace, House of Blood
Justice is out of the purview of poetry, unfortunately. Otherwise, the ancestors of the ninety-six Lenapes killed by rogue Pennsylvania militia men in 1782 might read this collection and find some much deserved peace. That Denise Low...
Book Review
Clumsy Beauty
Poetry is a high wire act, performance art—for some writers. J. K. Kennedy finds it to be her path to clarity, a clearing of destructive thought clutter, a crystallization of love, limitlessness, and the beauty of human existence....