By Sarah Haman

A lyric feminist remix, Maria Zoccola’s Helen of Troy, 1993, (Scribner, 2025), follows in the footsteps of Louise Glück and Carol Ann Duffy, layering the modern atop mythology in her investigation of Helen, the woman circa Tennessee in 1993. Just as dedicated to the description of place as construction of character, Zoccola layers the personification project of Ron Koertge’s Olympusville, the feminist voice of the Melissa Febos’s Girlhood, and brings her debut to life with the sonic lyricism found in Louise Glück’s Averno. The landscape of Helen of Troy, 1993, rife with swans, the open road, and complex webs of family strife, poses an alternative perspective to the responsibility and role of some of the most famously loved and hated women of Greek mythology. The poems center the voices of Helen, the collective women of Sparta, and Helen’s mother / the swan in prose, lyric, and most impressively in golden shovels that use lines from The Iliad.

By Dylan Loring

The 21 short stories in Dustin M. Hoffman’s Such a Good Man (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025) captivate from the get-go. With first sentences like “Dad’s drunk and riding the bucket,” “They told Eggy they’d be calling the cops soon, if their missing kid didn’t appear in the next ten minutes,” “The man with the yellow hat dragged his monkey out onto the balcony and locked it inside the wire-walled kennel,” and “He was hurling children into the pool,” these stories craft a momentum that never dissipates. Throughout the book, Hoffman’s working-class characters react to past, present, and potential losses—of parents, of lovers, of children, of jobs, of country, of games of Monopoly with God—and to stagnation, a fate that at least isn’t loss. If these themes sound meat-and-potatoes, all the better; Hoffman brings freshness, nuance, and flavor to these staples of human conflict.  

“Privy” starts out with Bill, the cheapest plumber in Saginaw, Michigan, working on fixing a toilet in a church restroom. A woman walks into the restroom, and Bill doesn’t immediately announce his presence, and feels too awkward to do so a few seconds later when she starts urinating. As a result, Bill tries to hide and overhears the woman on the phone yelling at her ex-husband, who seeks joint custody over their child. He, of course, gets discovered by the woman before she leaves the restroom. In addition to accusing Bill of being a perv and stealing his most expensive plumbing tool, she tells Bill, “Bet you think I’m a bitch after spying on my phone call. Men love spotting a bitch, right?” This couldn’t be further from the truth for Bill, whose wife recovered from cancer and then left him, and whose son August has also recently left to join her. He relates to the messiness of the situation on a personal level.  

Poetry Goes Pop: Michael Chang’s Toy Soldiers 

By Rocco Prioletti

Toy Soldiers (Action, Spectacle Press, 2024), is a work deeply intertwined with the always-on, always-spinning and ever-so-unknottable web of pop culture: from the 90s slacker rock of Eric’s Trip, to Paul Klee’s penchant for awful quotes; Timothée Chalamet’s rumored run-in with crabs, to unbathed Brooklynites who “read too much pynchon.” Michael Chang doesn’t avert their poetic gaze from the kitsch; instead they stare deeply into it, seeing bits of the world and a bit of themself in its glare.  

Following 2023’s Synthetic Jungle, Chang’s latest book disregards both traditional format and structure, offering a sporadic feed of contemporary themelessness. Continuing in the footsteps of likeminded poets like Frank O’Hara and Melissa Broder, Chang’s insistence on deconstructing the possibilities of lyric poetry gives way to experimentation on all fronts. Personifying our collective online unconsciousness, Chang’s only interest in communication is the informal: the often forgotten, sporadically-written notes app confessionals; the academically ‘lowbrow’ and underappreciated sincerity of texting; the recreational black humorists hiding in comment sections. For instance, in “Hope That’s True”, they imagine Anne Frank growing up during the 2010s bowlcut boom, remembering that a particular pop star once suggested that “Anne Frank would’ve been a belieber.”  

By Clare Hickey

Claire Bateman’s collection of hybrid short-shorts and poetry-like objects entitled The Pillow Museum (University of Alabama Press, 2025), is a masterclass in storytelling. The book chases every vibrant thread it lays out and weaves itself together into an unnamed shape. Bateman’s collection may be fantastical, but it is not nonsensical. The plots, characters, and conflicts are largely situated on some parallel plane of surrealism, but in Bateman’s dreamscapes, the feelings are real. Empathy is at the heart of the book, and even as Bateman creates inventions almost beyond belief,  giving us pillows that house the dreams of the heads that used to rest there, she also creates physical spaces for which we can’t help sympathizing. 

Despite the strangeness, the themes of Bateman’s work are not ambiguous. The opening story “Home Art” describes a woman playing a glass piano to keep the lights in the house running while her husband solves puzzles in the newspaper. She finds herself banging the keys raucously purely for the act of creating light at his bidding, playing songs backwards and soullessly, until she stops. The husband rises from his puzzle and begins to force her hands to play. She sheds her weight of female labor by entrapping him at the keys in her rebellion of noise: “The light came up even brighter as she smiled in her victory.” The story is a single page and yet the conflicts of a marriage are made clear.  

By Dion O’Reilly

Writers with an interest in the power of the poetic turn would do well to look at Susan Browne’s newest collection, Monster Mash (Four Way Books 2025). In this, her fourth book, Browne’s tone is confident, in full control of her spicy, wry pragmaticism. The reader is comfortably willing to stay with the narrator as she plays tennis, shops for clothes, or crashes a Ford Galaxie. But despite the seemingly pedestrian activities, this speaker’s thoughts and observations leap through time and space, following strands of thought into imaginary worlds exploring the veil between life and death, the known and the unknown, until finally, a little more is understood, or, if not understood, at least accepted.

Browne creates her many voltas through skillful manipulation of English linguistic modes, tenses, and literary devices. She repeatedly moves from indicative tense, which involves the known world, to a subjunctive world, which we might broadly define less as a grammatical form and more as the unseen world of desire and mystery. Furthermore, Browne frequently incorporates other modes: the imperative command form and the interrogative question mode. She sprinkles in dialogue, direct address, lists, and abrupt changes in verb tenses. Each of these shifts gracefully moves the reader into the poem’s insight.

Review: Dion O’Reilly’s Limerence & Ghost Dogs

By Riley Miller

In Dion O’Reilly’s newest collection, Limerence, (Floating Bridge Press, 2025), she dives into the complicated and often turbulent terrain of intense infatuation, capturing the essence of a psychological state that feels deeply unsettling, yet addictive. Her poems prove that the strong emotions we associate with adolescence truly never die. She navigates this emotional language with a raw honesty, creating a group of poems that is sure to resonate with anyone who has experienced the consuming power of obsessive desire.

The word itself, limerence, deals with the state of intense longing, and O’Reilly seeks to explore the nuances of this state, moving beyond simple, romantic love and examining the unrequited, often painful, aspects of intense attraction. The poems act as a record of this experience, documenting the highs and lows of limerent attachment. However, she doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects that occur when experiencing an all-consuming obsession. Delving into the destabilizing effects of an abusive relationship, O’Reilly artfully constructs the idea of being connected to such a creature. The collection reveals the way in which this state can lead to delusion and even self-destruction. In “Sasquatch Hunter” O’Reilly writes:

By Shelbie Music

Philosophy, poetry, science, geography, history, linguistics—these all combine in Vivian Blaxell’s hybrid collection of personal essays, Worthy of the Event (LittlePuss Press, 2025). Wide-ranging in its intellect and guiding us across multiple countries, the book sweeps readers into Blaxell’s life as a trans woman growing up in the second half of the 20^th Century, and gazes upon the people, relationships, places, and memories that have informed the identity and outlook she has today. Skillfully engaging with various authors and disciplines, Blaxell uses their work as foundations for her own, forming an evocative collection that focuses on disparate topics, yet revolves around the central theme of becoming and being. When has one “become”? Is “becoming” a perpetual state? And more importantly, how does one become worthy of an event, brave in the face of the onslaught of our world? Worthy of the Event seeks to answer these monumental, incessant questions with a sharp intellect and an open, beating, bloody heart. 

Review: Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s Rodeo 

By Evan Green

Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s 2025 collection, Rodeo (published by Autumn House Press), is deeply emotional, with poems of loss and sorrow underscored by expansive imagery of the American West. Rodeo is Wilkinson’s third collection of poetry and recently won the 2024 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. As a Utah native, Wilkinson uses her experiences to highlight the beauty of Western life as well as the hardships that come with living in such an environment. She takes readers through many different stories and settings, all while discussing extremely personal subjects and handling them with care and awareness. The book is a powerful exploration of love that carries readers alongside each speaker as they move through wide open spaces, both literal and metaphorical.  

From the first poem, it’s obvious how deeply connected Wilkinson feels to her home in Utah. Readers will notice recurring images of fire and violence associated with death alongside the volatile yet beautiful world of Western nature. Making use of this imagery, the collection immerses readers in feelings of loss and struggle as many of the poems explore the sorrow and self-reflection that comes with the loss of a child. The first section of the book doesn’t shy away from the harsh realities of grief and masterfully gives readers the time to process alongside the speaker. The second section mainly focuses on the aftermath and the self-reflection that comes as a mother tries to find herself again. Wilkinson’s strong narrative-driven poetry lends itself to the storytelling present within the collection. 

Poetry, Pain, and the Power of Expression in Therese Gleason’s Hemicrania 

By Bridget Rexhausen

Therese Gleason’s latest book, Hemicrania (Chestnut Review Chapbooks, 2024), focuses on migraines—deriving its title from a word that, taken from Greek, means “half skull,” something she plays on in this brilliant collection.  

Balancing lyrical language with the harsh reality of living with migraines, Gleason’s book begins with straightforward, biographical, narrative poems about the condition, before taking readers on a journey of vampires, global warming, and witchy spells, all of which she uses as metaphors to explore migraines. Gleason’s words manage to convey much more than her physical struggle, and the most notable feature of the book is her ability to connect her pain with her spiritual anguish. As she considers the nature of her condition, readers are prompted to think about the generational effects of maladies like migraines, which is a great strength of this very impressive book. 

The Greatest Granny: Jennifer Schomburg Kanke’s The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had 

By Madison Liming

Poet and fiction writer Jennifer Schomburg Kanke’s full-length poetry collection The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had (Kelsay Books, 2024) encompasses World War II, the Great Depression, and the Ohio River Flood of 1937, and it gives us a picture of the grandma we all wish we had. Spanning from 1919 to 2006, Kanke crafts a narrative that is both deeply personal and historically resonant, giving voice to the often-overlooked experiences of women who lived through those tumultuous times in Appalachian Ohio, including Kanke’s beloved grandmother, Enid. Enid is the primary inspiration behind the poems, serving as a central figure and occasional speaker, and she is a lens through which the reader experiences the hardships and joys of life in this region.  

By Kate Fox

On the dust jacket of In the Outer Dark (1970), Stanley Plumly’s first book of poetry, fellow poet William Stafford writes an endorsement that, after reading Plumly’s Collected Works, strikes me as a premonition as well as high praise:

The rightness of these poems, line after line, exhilarates the reader, who discovers himself (sic) through encounter with a whole range of objects and ideas, each held firmly in language that appears natural and looms from the ordinary into the rich and unexpected.

The gift of Plumly’s poetry is exactly that “encounter with a whole range of objects and ideas,” into which everyone and everything is welcomed. In the Outer Dark introduces some of Plumly’s favorite themes: his family and his home state of Ohio; the art and artists he studied as an undergraduate; an attention to nature born of farm living and a love of walking; and finally, travel and the love of history it instills. Noticeably absent, however, are poems about birds; the Romantics, particularly Keats; and the technical and stylistic range he would display in later collections.

Stafford’s most prescient observation about Plumly’s work is that everything is “held firmly in language . . .” Plumly’s belief in the ability of language to preserve or resurrect what is loved, lost, past, or forgotten is a distinguishing feature of Plumly’s poems. “What is experience except its words?” Plumly asks in Against Sunset (2017). Indeed, what is anything except its words?