Book Review
Ask the Brindled
Truth spoken by poets matters more simply because the poet settles for nothing but the truth, so help her Veritas, daughter of Saturn. Such vigilance is arduous, and as a queer, Indigenous Hawaiian, No’u Revilla is as singular a voice...
Book Review
La Movida
Inspiration: handy stuff, if you can find it. Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta secured theirs in the revolutionary struggles of Chicana feminists and Spain’s Post-Franco queer punk movement, so this collection doesn’t play nice with fascists...
Book Review
oh, you thought this was a date?!
Careening towards the apocalypse, we’d be choosy about sitting shotgun next to anyone but a poet. Who else could keep the conversation lively with brimstone on the breath? C. Russell Price, keep that seat open for us, will ya? A Lambda...
Book Review
Song of My Softening
We are born of parents and the times, and we live lives of freedom and preordained constraint (arguably). Thou shall not make excuses. Born the daughter of African and Caribbean immigrants in Britain, queer poet Omotara James earned her...
Book Review
Comeback Evolution
His talent unmistakable from the earliest days, Walter K. Delbridge was sidetracked by the civil rights movement, Vietnam draft, schizophrenia, and institutionalization—though his recovery was never a question, even while he labored in...
Book Review
Produce Wagon
In the best of poetry—unmistakably present and resonant to the reader—we find the physical embodiment of wordcraft: sound, rhythm, music. What Roy Scheele creates on the page is poetry’s equivalent to the enlightenment of the...
Book Review
None of This Belongs to Me
A new poet commands spontaneous attention. What never existed is suddenly, irrevocably secured between Ellie Sawatzky and reader because of the power of her work. This debut collection follows Sawatzky’s receipt of the CV2’s 2017...
Book Review
A Man with a Rake
We can convince ourselves that we know Midwestern soil, a stream bank, the stillness of a cedar fence post, but Ted Kooser shows otherwise in this collection of eighteen poems, his fifteenth collection. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner,...