Book Review
Each Luminous Thing
Care, from carry: as happens mysteriously in utero; from what was once her single-selfed existence, the poet assumes the burdens of maternity—a carrier‘s nine-month care package that stretches into motherhood and beyond. In "Each...
Book Review
Ephemera
A relationship advice podcaster advocating “just break up,” Sierra DeMulder champions the value of those things that exist only briefly: love, life—“every poem is about death / when you are reading to the dying”—music,...
Book Review
Flare, Corona
Edginess, unsettlement, a sense of foreboding: what weather can come to bear and a skillful poet with some thoughts on mortality to share. Jeannine Hall Gailey’s ability to turn it up—or down, thankfully—is what makes reading her...
Book Review
Heavy Is the Head
Black women poets matter in ways that poets of other races and ethnicities can’t: “Black girl must write poetry so other black girls can relate.” That Black girl poetry readers matter … do you understand? This debut collection...
Book Review
What to Count
Sound. Alise Alousi sounds her words to arrive as cadence, as music, as magic. Sounds easy, until you realize how large her collection of eye teeth would be if she traded her secret with other poets. A Kresge Literary Arts Fellow and the...
Book Review
I Love Information
In extreme cases, imagination is an affliction, or did we mean addiction? Please stop, says the poet, let’s pause here. But that seems not an option for Courtney Bush: “I would calm down if it weren’t for the risk of dislocating my...
Book Review
Trouble Funk
Black music—funk, soul, disco—from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, coupled with the love shared by his parents, set the rhythm and inspiration for this collection, Douglas Manuel’s second after Testify, itself a Benjamin Franklin...
Book Review
Impossible Belonging
Impossible Belonging, Maya Pindyck’s third collection after Emoticoncert and Friend Among Stones, received the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry on the heels of her fellowships and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, Poetry...