"The Freedom Business" (Wordsong, 978-1-932425-57-4) is a cross of forms encompassing an original narrative transcribed from a 1798 manuscript by the one-time slave Venture Smith, poems from Newberry Honor author Marilyn Nelson, and art... Read More

In a world saturated with mass-produced glossy images designed to catch one’s attention, the artist, of all creators, has an obligation to present his vision with a particularly lucid authority. John Hodgen’s poems countermand the... Read More

Most Americans’ images of Korea extend little further than Hyundais and demilitarized zones and vague stories about eating dogs. This book, which offers fairly generous samplings of three very different Korean poets, may help begin to... Read More

Having read this book, acclaimed poet and university lecturer David R. Slavitt calls the author “one of the best dozen or so poets writing in America. Here, she not only maintains but even surpasses her previous high level of... Read More

The author’s second book and winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, this volume reads like glossolalia: it’s an ecstatic speaking in tongues. “O verb, o void. Not more loose, but I kept a part back. I ogled the hostels, figured the... Read More

If you’d asked me a week ago, / I’d have said no, I wouldn’t love someone who’d had a sex change. / But that was a week ago, and today I’m feeling gutsy. Most of the poems in this first collection are gutsy. They are sexual and... Read More

Here are poems of a non-confessional tone, which consider the thoughts and emotions one may have, but may not always be willing to admit. Specifically, Rivard explores the tension between the life that he is suddenly living when he... Read More

Ezra Pound’s wry dictum that poetry be at least as well written as prose has ever had its rebels: poems sheared of punctuation, capitalization or cadence; a poet’s narrative I of prosaic artlessness that both desires and denies the... Read More