October 21, 2025.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Claire Eder

When encountering a new poetic voice, especially one that reaches me in translation, I often find myself flipping frequently between the main text and the notes section in the back of the book, grasping for purchase. Once the poems have drawn me in, I want more. I’m nosy and I desire at least some of the crucial details about this person: what was their childhood like? Why does the image of an orange slice keep reappearing? What is this geopolitical conflict, not obvious to a twenty-first century American reader, that they’re referencing in certain poems? While endnotes in academic texts can be dry, I find the notes in volumes of poetry can often be juicy, giving little peeks behind the curtain.

For this reason, I am enthusiastic about the format that Christina Cook has created in Roaming the Labyrinth with Marie-Claire Bancquart (Aim Higher, 2025), and I’d be happy to see other works in translation adopt such a structure. Roaming the Labyrinth essentially takes the notes section, expands it, and plops it into the main text. The poems are nested in between prose sections offering analysis, context, and personal reflection. (The book also has actual endnotes with helpful material.) Through this unique structure, we get a rare glimpse into the translator-poet relationship, in this case a friendship that lasted many years, until Bancquart’s death in 2019. We come to understand certain choices that Cook made in her translations, and we get a true portrait of the remarkable, generous writer at the center of the text (labyrinth). What’s more, we are privy to a conversation between the translations and Cook’s own poetry, as she includes a handful of her poems that were shaped by her relationship with Bancquart.

October 21, 2025.Reading time 8 minutes.

Review: Bill Hollands’ Mangrove

By Evan Green

Bill Hollands’s debut collection, Mangrove (published by ELJ Editions, 2025), takes readers through poems of nostalgia, grief, and family, primarily set against the lush backdrop of Florida. Raised in Miami, Hollands paints vivid images not only of the Floridian environment, but also the losses that he has faced. Hollands’s poetry also teems with references to the famous faces of his youth, all while he explores those personal memories. Combining this grief, and references to bygone 70s TV, Mangrove is a moving reflection on a queer life lived to the fullest. In tender and reflective poems, it guides readers through personal transformation and transformations in our televised culture.

From the beginning of his collection, it’s clear how large an impact both television and the natural environment had on Hollands as a child. Recurring images of verdant plant life alongside references to stars from the 60s through the 80s paint the picture of a childhood perched at a sliding glass door between the light of the outdoors and the glow of the television screen. The collection evokes feelings of nostalgia for that late-twentieth century moment—in all its velvet.

In the first section, Hollands dwells on a queer childhood, artfully reminiscing on a time full of new experiences and personal hardships. The second section focuses on Hollands’s family as he ponders the loss of several loved ones with bittersweet remembrance. Finally, the third section reflects on Hollands’s life as a whole, touching on emotion-filled moments from both his childhood and present-day life as a partner, parent, and teacher.

October 21, 2025.Reading time 10 minutes.

Review: Dear Boobs by Cassie Burkhardt

By Tyler List

Cassie Burkhardt’s collection, Dear Boobs (Bottlecap Press, 2025), is a linked collection of well-crafted poems that deal with motherhood and a longing for love. Despite its comical title, Burkhardt’s poems take the reader into the life of a mother trying to get through the day while simultaneously raising her children and maintaining her own sense of self. The tone of many of these swings from chaotic, poetic maximalism to peaceful wisdom, mimicking the rhythms of the speaker’s domestic life. We learn from the poems that Burkhardt is the mother of three kids with her husband, a brain surgeon, and that she’s worried about becoming invisible.

Each poem deals with its own individual, episodic-like story, jumping between images of the speaker herself, her husband, or her kids—Burkhardt’s good at showcasing a feeling of daily life passing by, as she also wrestles with self-doubt, the joy of motherhood, and the excitement of circus school—a hobby she has picked up to reclaim some sense of herself as an individual. Burkhardt’s skill is in knitting together the various styles that arise from describing these activities. She comes across as a disheveled, excitable, bold person—a full human being!—as she addresses what it means to be a mother (and more).

October 21, 2025.Reading time 3 minutes.

Review of Iridescent Pigeons by Candace Walsh

By Nicholas Skaldetvind

Candace Walsh’s Iridescent Pigeons (Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2024) pulses along the spectral tide of memory, braiding the intimate with the mundane, creating a textured meditation on love, familial bonds, and personal reclamation. Her language weaves everyday objects from lemons, dogs, seaweed into a resonant web of at-once connections and separations, echoing Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sensuous attention to form and rhythm: “Glory be to goddesses of heft— / The plush, broad, soft, round, thick.” Walsh’s adroit application of stylistic devices, with an ear keyed for language, illuminates the “sensuous beauty of everyday life” through a lexicon that recalls the lyrical introspection of Woolf’s The Waves and Bishop’s careful rendering of the physical: “I split the lemons crosswise twice, packed salt into the creases, / and stuffed them in the jar until their blood became their brine.”

In the book, Walsh ranges from the cento and Sapphic stanzas to free verse, showing a marriage of form and emotional breadth. This reconciliation of form and freedom allows the collection’s overarching themes to come out more clearly; each poem inhabits spaces of queer eros, domesticity, and the unresolved. In poems like “Bowed Beauty” the lyrical voice works with the corporeal as Walsh channels Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” creating an ode to the fullness and shape of bodies, capturing a feverish excitement that resists society’s prescribed containment: “When we could finally pounce, / how hot it surged, / or hardly stirred—so deeply stilled. / We know how much it costs / to cut it off. I’d rather clean up blood.” 

Review: 12 Oxen Under the Sea, by Craig Bernardini

October 21, 2025.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Jenna Brown

In a blend of magical realism and surrealist technique, Craig Bernardini’s intrepid short-story collection, 12 OXEN UNDER THE SEA (New American Press, 2025), masterfully meshes domestic concerns with the absurd. In twelve idiosyncratic narratives, Bernardini contemplates death, isolation, parenting, sea creatures, guys named Carl, marital tensions, trauma, and the supernatural. Each story successfully asks us to suspend our disbelief as we encounter: a grieving father turning aquatic in his son’s pond and finding his previously dead wife in its depths; an extravagant hotel continually catching fire for increasingly arcane reasons; a revival house’s playing of Rachmaninoff causing phantasmagoric hallucinations. Or, in 16th century England, the occupant of an inn has his furnishings move due to an inexplicable poltergeist-like disturbance.

What makes Bernardini’s writing so effective is his ability to deftly make the uncanny a part of our world. His literary realms are absurdist, but only to a point. While the stories can be nonsensical, normal rules still apply—there are still bowling balls, bikes, and breakfasts. A child in a Manhattan Italian restaurant can burst into an eternal flame, but the characters themselves still order chicory salad from a menu. But even so, his worlds are not simple and tangible with only one odd thing jarring us. His stories never hinge on that single anomaly, and they hardly ever have a pat conclusion. Almost every time, we are still left in a joyously ambivalent place, thinking, “What just happened??”

October 21, 2025.Reading time 10 minutes.

Review: George Choundas’s I Think I’ll Stay Here Forever

By Grace Cooper

George Choundas’s short story collection I Think I’ll Stay Here Forever, winner of the 2025 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, explores the uncanny ways we navigate loss, hardship, and change. Across twelve stories packed with molasses ships, fighting roosters, and persnickety aunts, Choundas explores the way we don’t necessarily have a complete fix on our identities. He’s a mesmerizing storyteller of our growing and shifting experiences.

Halfway through the collection we have the joy of reading “The Sisters Jeppard,” a story previously published by New Ohio Review. In that story, the narrator talks about their cousin’s first and second wives and develops that idea of unfixed identity. The first wife was loved very deeply by her mother and two aunts, otherwise described as “the three sisters.” The narrator seems almost judgmental of the care and attention the three sisters gave the first wife, describing her “upbringing” as “so different from how the hard world handles a person.” The first wife tragically passes away and, following her death, the narrator discusses the death of other loved ones that they’re seemingly much closer to, such as their cousin and the cousin’s second wife, who becomes her best friend. The family relationships are complicated, almost ornate, and Choundas wants us to get enmeshed in the strange way connection builds and grief lingers. After losing all these people, the narrator thinks back and reflects on the three sisters’ love with a new perspective:

Review: A Preponderance of Starry Beings by Samantha Edmonds

October 21, 2025.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Emilie DeOreo

Samantha Edmonds’s newest short-story collection A Preponderance of Starry Beings tackles the tensions between childhood egocentrism and the vastness of the worlds—both literal and metaphorical—beyond us. As children, the egocentrism stage is pivotal for our development, shaping how we understand our place in the world through our own limited perceptions. Yet the suggestion that something might exist beyond our physical planet allows some children to grasp, however faintly, that the world extends far past their immediate experiences and the boundaries of their own bodies. In space, they are merely singular specks of dust among the ever-expanding cosmos. A Preponderance of Starry Beings gives its readers a chance to realize how deeply connected we all are to the boundless unknown of the universe, and Edmonds’s characters, whether on Earth or elsewhere, act as a bridge between the ordinary and the extraordinary, showing how even mundane experiences can carry an otherworldly resonance that links us to the larger cosmos.

Some of Edmonds’s stories are explicit in their relationship between normal everyday domesticity and galactic happenings, such as “The Adventures of Starboy and Earthgirl,” which follows two girls in the late 90s, their passion for all things Spock and Captain Kirk, and their love for each other. Other stories are more subtle about the cosmos connection, such as the impressively linked pieces that feature Ruth Emerson, a late-adolescent character Edmonds returns to multiple times, whose eyes are pointed toward heaven, but whose faith in a larger purpose is tested. Edmonds’s collection as a whole transforms the infinite landscape of space into a mirror for human emotion, demonstrating that no matter how small or isolated we may feel, our identities and experiences are inextricably linked. Whether her stories are about queer coming-of-age or spiritual unraveling, Edmonds shows us that connection (like starlight) travels faster than we could ever imagine, seeming to reach even those who believe they are completely alone.

Review: Helen of Troy, 1993, by Maria Zoccola

June 1, 2025.Reading time 7 minutes.

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.

Review: Such a Good Man by Dustin M. Hoffman

June 1, 2025.Reading time 8 minutes.

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.

June 1, 2025.Reading time 5 minutes.

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.”

Review: Claire Bateman’s The Pillow Museum

June 1, 2025.Reading time 4 minutes.

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.

The Power of the Turn: Quantum Leaps in Susan Browne’s Monster Mash

June 1, 2025.Reading time 11 minutes.

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.

June 1, 2025.Reading time 7 minutes.

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:

Review: Vivian Blaxell’s Worthy of the Event

June 1, 2025.Reading time 8 minutes.

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.

June 1, 2025.Reading time 5 minutes.

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.

June 1, 2025.Reading time 8 minutes.

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.

June 1, 2025.Reading time 7 minutes.

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.

Review: Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly

June 1, 2025.Reading time 20 minutes.

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?

A Kind of Terroir: Anna Farro Henderson’s Core Samples

November 8, 2024.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Jenna Brown

Amid a climate crisis—hurricane after hurricane in the Gulf Coast, flooding in the Sahara Desert, and bleaching coral reefs—Anna Farro Henderson’s Core Samples (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) attempts to redefine our interconnectedness with the Earth in its intimate writing style.

Published in late-2024, Core Samples follows Henderson’s experience as she balances motherhood, writing, work as a climate scientist, and her time as an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton. Weaving together scientific findings, stories of misogyny in the science field, and anecdotes of foibles in governmental systems, Henderson creates a captivating memoir that screams at the top of its lungs, “carpe diem” (but also “fuck carpe diem”).

Henderson begins her narrative with a notebook, the “first tool” she obtained as a scientist. “While some people see art and science as opposites,” she writes, “for me, they are a braided river, each strand and flow an approach to wonder.” Climate change primarily has not been a main political concern, her writing implies, because of the inaccessibility of climate science literature (i.e. scholarly publications, journals, and studies). Through memoir, Henderson makes the climate crisis approachable, framing our interaction with the Earth’s systems as a relationship, an ongoing story.

Review: The Boy Who Reads in the Trees by Ron Mohring

November 7, 2024.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Kate Fox

In a 1967 interview with Time magazine, Elizabeth Bishop said of the Confessional Poets, who were her contemporaries, “You just wish they’d keep some of these things to themselves.” Having secrets of her own, she kept her own poems cool and distant, cerebral and succinct. What is interesting, though, is that she didn’t use the term “confessional” to describe these poets. Instead, she referred to the work of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass, her close friend Robert Lowell, and others as the “School of Anguish.” After reading Ron Mohring’s The Boy Who Reads in the Trees (The Word Works, 2024), I would place these poems firmly in that category.

“Confessional” implies that someone needs to confess—that they’ve done something wrong or shameful. Bishop seems to have sensed that the term was all wrong. These poets weren’t confessing things they’d done; they were in anguish about things that had been done to them: Bullying. Neglect. Homophobia. Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse—and the depression, alcoholism, addiction, suicidal thoughts, and other mental maladies that might naturally result from such treatment.

Review of City Nave by Betsy Brown

November 6, 2024.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Tessa Carman

A good guide welcomes her charges into a new building, book, or idea, and prepares them for encounter, perhaps struggle, and for unexpected delight. She pulls open doors previously locked, unveils portraits, and leads the group up balustrades, through vaults, and up turret stairs, peering into transoms, calling attention to cornices and corbels and rayonets. But she never gets in the way of the encounter; she arranges, interprets, but ultimately steps aside so that they can see for themselves.

A good teacher is a guide, who has also been the seeker, the asker of questions, and remains so, even as she becomes someone who inspires others to see, to seek and question, and then to make their own songs, sculptures, portraits, craft.

Betsy Brown is that kind of docent, and her debut poetry collection, City Nave (Resource Books, 2024), is structured like a cathedral, comprising four sections: “Stairs” leads us to the “Narthex,” a sort of waiting room before entering the sanctuary, the “Nave,” at the center, within which we find the “Altar.”

I love showing Betsy Brown’s poems to my students. There’s a quality to the poetry that makes it an especial joy to share her with young people on the cusp of adulthood. Hers is a wise and winsome voice that has that golden quality of a good teacher. She respects the intelligence of her students, her audience. And she passes on the fruits of her own keen attention, inviting them in to see better—sometimes by asking them with her lively language to stand on their heads while they look.

Review: Retribution Forthcoming by Katie Berta

July 16, 2024.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Erin Redfern

Across the poems in Katie Berta’s Retribution Forthcoming (Ohio University Press, 2024), a self-aware speaker works to come to grips with her complex apprehensions about beauty, identity, virtue, and violence. In an interview with Rob McLennan, Berta affirms that “poems are a place of internal quiet in which I get to explicate what I think and feel without the invading presence of another mind.” The effect is as if Sartre’s play No Exit featured different aspects of only one character having a high-stakes, if informal, colloquy. As with that play, we keep reading for the quality of the conversation, which in Retribution is unpretentious, perceptive, often sardonically funny, and always intensely searching.

The collection opens with “Compact,” in which the speaker’s dog “locks him- self // in my boyfriend’s office while we’re gone” and “chews the clothes . . . to smithereens, maybe to keep himself from chewing / himself.” As Berta’s book explores, a person locked in her own mind without recourse to faith in something bigger has nothing to chew but the self. Berta continues, “Asking questions of god is, of course, chewing // yourself. Though, in some situations it’s practical. / Like when some part of you is / what’s caught.” This “cleaved” self reappears throughout the book, and the poems in which it appears run the gamut from everyday absurdity (“Becky! Are you trying to text a different Katie?”) to existential angst (“Batter my heart, you no-personed god”) to traumatized dissociation (“so I went off into the ceiling’s coarseness . . . until it was over”). This cleaving shows up grammatically in the recurring slide between first- and second-person pronouns that characterizes the majority of the poems.

Review: My Life in Brutalist Architecture by John Gallaher

July 16, 2024.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Kevin Prufer

For two decades now, John Gallaher has been quietly writing some of the most pleasurable and compelling poetry in the United States, including the books The Little Book of Guesses (Four Way Books, 2007), In a Landscape (BOA, 2014), and Brand New Spacesuit (BOA Editions, 2020). In his newest collection, My Life in Brutalist Architecture (Four Way Books, 2024), he is at his very best.

The book begins with a quote from Ruth Graham: “There is something temptingly tidy about the idea of adoption: a family with extra love and resources meets a child in desperate need of both.” From there, through meditations on his own adoption in 1968, Gallaher goes on to show just how untidy his life and thoughts on the subject are. But there’s nothing dogmatic here, nothing sentimental. Gallaher offers no lessons for readers and comes to no solutions. Rather, in poem after poem, he explores the subject with complexity and inquisitiveness, his mind shuffling through his own experiences, memories, suppositions. A photo of himself as a baby removed from its frame for the first time reveals his birth name written on the back. What might the poet have become had he kept that name? Where would he have gone? Is the name dead, or does it belong to some other version of himself, a version he might consult for guidance? “My fear says / these people don’t love me,” Gallaher writes. “They adopted me by mistake.” In poem after poem, the poet offers readers not just a meditation on the complexities of adoption, but on the variations of the idea of the self, on the slipperiness of identity, personality, and all our passages through years. “What,” he asks at one point, “does the self consist of? // The theme is time. The theme is unspooling.”

Review: If I Could Give You a Line by Carrie Oeding

July 16, 2024.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Claire Bateman

In If I Could Give You a Line (University of Akron Press, 2023), Carrie Oeding further develops the voice-driven associational thinking that characterizes her first collection, Our List of Solutions (42 Miles Press, 2011), while recontextualizing and transcending its concerns. The earlier poems are richly populated with neighbors, lovers, friends, and peers as their speaker navigates the fraught social dynamics of early adulthood, repeatedly referencing music/dance as she struggles to map out a workable configuration of intimacies and distances. Primary emotions include status-anxiety and longing—sexual/romantic, and even ontological. In the poem “Joy,” Oeding writes “And if everything is aspiring to be music— / the making and the dancing and the joying, / if they are all dying to be music, why does music just get to be music?” If I Could Give You a Line is continuous with that project in terms of Oeding’s fascination with space and distance; however, in the new collection, she explores relationships (both intimate ones with her partner and her daughter and intellectual/aesthetic ones with the work of a number of artists), questioning the nature of place itself. The book comes across as a series of dance-like thought experiments about motion in poems such as “The Making of Things,” in which Oeding, responding to Richard Long’s conceptual land sculpture, “A Line Made by Walking,” uses a strategy of negation to interrogate a variety of understandings of the line:

Review: The Moonflowers by Abigail Rose-Marie

July 16, 2024.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Apoorva Bradshaw-Mittal

Up from the barren, parched earth, a statue grows. A man,
for a woman is too malleable to be immortalized in stone.
-from The Moonflowers

The moonflower—named so because it blooms only at night—collects its aroma throughout the day, and as it blooms, it spreads an intense jasmine-like fragrance. In Abigail Rose-Marie’s debut novel The Moonflowers (Lake Union Publishing, 2024), the flower is not just a symbol of beauty and enchantment, but also a symbol of freedom, of the “malleable” woman-figure adapting to its conditions and finding ways to bloom even in extreme circumstances.

The Moonflowers is framed as a mystery novel set in a small Appalachian town where secrets have been carried through generations—the secret behind the death of celebrated hero Benjamin Costello; the secret behind the women who have gone missing during the years leading up to Benjamin’s death; and the secret of why the narrator, Tig (Antigone) Costello, left behind a burgeoning career at the Art Institute of Chicago. The book begins with Tig taking up the project to learn more about her grandfather Benjamin and to use her research to create a painting in memoriam. As she reaches the small, dusty town, it’s quite apparent that Darren, Kentucky, is almost in ruins, as if all economic progress stopped after Costello’s death. Tig soon discovers that the town may have never seen any kind of prosperity to begin with, and rotting under the surface is misogyny so deep that, even in the 1997 of the novel, women are treated as second-class citizens by the townspeople.

Review: Daughters of the New Year by E. M. Tran

July 16, 2024.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Gwen E. Kirby

I feel keen anticipation and anxiety when I start a book that has set itself A Challenge. Will the author pull off a magic trick or will The Challenge become a gimmick? Will it add a new dimension to the characters’ stories or will it become an intellectual exercise, A Challenge for the sake of itself?

In Daughters of the New Year (Hanover Square Press, 2022), E. M. Tran tells the story of the Vietnamese-immigrant Trung family through its women, beginning in present-day New Orleans and moving backward in time through Hurricane Katrina to the fall of Saigon, the French occupation of Vietnam, and finally to fragments of an almost mythic past. The novel is a beautiful example of when A Challenge—here, telling a story backward—can give new depths to classic themes. Tran’s exploration of legacy, family, and cultural memory is complicated and shows us how the past refuses to offer up answers even when we have imaginative access to it.

Review: Cactus Country by Zoë Bossiere

July 16, 2024.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Nicole Walker

I first met Zoë Bossiere (they/she) when I visited Ander Monson’s undergraduate nonfiction course. We had an intense conversation about how to balance information and lyricism in our essays. I knew them as the managing editor of Brevity Magazine which publishes essays of writers working in the brief form. Many of these essays lean toward the lyrical side, like Brenda Miller’s “Swerve,” which begins with one very grounded scene but then spins out to include a litany of mini-scenes whose sonic and imagistic connections blow the top of one’s head off. Bossiere also recently edited and published, with Erica Trabold, The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins (Wayne State University Press, 2023) which draws from a broad group of writers to argue that the lyric is indeed a powerful persuasive force for change.

So, I was surprised when I started to read Cactus Country (Abrams Press, 2024). On a flight to Minneapolis, as I turned page after page like the book was on fire, I thought, This book is the most narrative memoir I have ever read. I am prone to exaggeration. I know of many memoirs that move by story more than association, but Cactus Country holds tightly onto narrative and doesn’t let go. And, neither could I, as I fell in love with the author’s rendering of place and of their allegiance to how the narrator’s body moved through that place.

Review: Sonnez Les Matines by J. C. Scharl

March 9, 2024.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Betsy K. Brown

The greatest murder mysteries are often hilarious. Perhaps this is because, as investigator Porfiry Petrovich says in Crime and Punishment, “Human nature is a mirror, sir, the clearest mirror!” Raskolnikov, and other famous murderers in many stories, are not that different from ourselves. How should we respond to this devastating fact? Laughter may be the answer.

Sonnez Les Matines by Jane Clark Scharl is many things—a verse play, a murder mystery, a philosophical dialogue—but it is also simply and deeply funny. A trio of famous former Parisians: François Rabelais, Jean Calvin, and Ignatius of Loyola, stumble upon a dead body during Mardi Gras, and spend the story arguing about who is guilty. In the play this is both an immediate question and a cosmic question, as the interlocutors explore everything from the weapon and evidence to the incarnation of Jesus and what happens when we die. Meanwhile, there is also ample banter, finger-pointing, and poop jokes.

Vitality in Poetry, a Review of Ponds by J. C. Scharl

March 8, 2024.Reading time 15 minutes.

By Jonathan Geltner

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

So says Jesus in the Gospel of John. It is a line that occurs to me often when I consider the influence of religious ideas—in this case, Christian—on a writer’s ability to engage with the fullness of life. That is a vague phrase, I realize: fullness of life. Perhaps it would be helpful to say what gets in the way of fullness of life.

There are two major obstacles, in my view. One is material: the virtual world we have constructed and inhabit through screens is by its nature a thing set apart from real life. The more time a writer spends immersed in that world, the less she is able to observe, reflect upon, and move bodily through the real world, the given world of nature and human society as it is experienced face-to-face. The second obstacle is mental: the temptation to delude ourselves, to live in a fantasy of who we are, pretending to believe and feel what we think we ought to believe and feel or want to believe and feel in order to secure membership in a particular tribe.

Review: Newly Not Eternal by George David Clark

March 7, 2024.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Michael Lavers

Newly Not Eternal, the second collection by George David Clark, is a book in which time has burned the dross away. The poems look small, but like Blake’s grain of sand each holds a world. The prologue poem, “Mosquito,” is a manifesto which, with its childlike music and theological contrariness, I think the author of “The Fly” would recognize:

                              God was only acting godly
                              when he strapped a dirty needle
                              to the fly
                              and taught it how to curtsy
                              on our knees and elbows

                              on our necks and earlobes
                              so politely that it hardly
                              stirs an eye.
                              God was hard but speaking softly
                              when He told us we should die.

It’s like Paradise Lost covered by Ariel, Shakespeare’s most musical character. Most of the poems have that spirit’s melodic drive, sitting somewhere between nursery-rhymes and spells.

Review: A Beautiful Persistence: Nancy Miller Gomez’s Inconsolable Objects

March 6, 2024.Reading time 20 minutes.

By Erin Redfern

In her essay “Voices from the air,” Adrienne Rich notes that a captivating poem is “an instrument for embodied experience.” Inconsolable Objects, Nancy Miller Gomez’s first full-length book, is chock-full of such instruments. The word “body” itself enters in the third line of the collection, and from that point serves as a primary interface between the poems’ various speakers and the vast territory of experience they are navigating.

Full-Throated Singing: A Review of Kari Gunter-Seymour’s Dirt Songs

March 5, 2024.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Bonnie Proudfoot

From the first line of the first poem of Kari Gunter-Seymour’s new poetry collection, Dirt Songs (Eastover Press 2024), we are presented with a poetic voice that sings with authority, perspective, and experience, also one that is grounded in place. “Where I’m from, girls learn / to conjure young . . .” and with that, readers are enticed to discover more about both the poet and the place she came of age in. In Dirt Songs, dedicated to “All the invisible girls,” Gunter-Seymour writes against invisibility, conjuring identity through personal history, story, naming, heightened use of detail, and through humor, grief, and pride. “Our grandmother. . . wielded a scythe and hoe / good as any man. . . drew us maps, where we came from.” These songs call attention to phrasing and language, to the rhythms of speech of Appalachian Southeastern Ohio, rich with imagery and music, a place where, “. . . [windshield] wipers slip-slap the beat / like two metal spoons against the thigh.” Speech patterns overflow into the making of poems. “I was a new mother,” Gunter-Seymour writes, “alone more than was fit.”

Insight and Echo: A Review of Kate Fox’s The Company Misery Loves

March 4, 2024.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Rose M. Smith

Within the first few lines of Kate Fox’s latest collection The Company Misery Loves (Sheila-Na-Gig 2024), we embark on a journey to consider the role of inevitability in shaping how we face or embrace life’s absolutes. In language that shimmers on the page, she becomes stage director, tour guide, host as we follow her lead over a marvelous succession of former landscapes. We are invited in turn to believe and to suspend our former belief, to hear the author’s voice and the voices this author has shared so insightfully that one wonders when each poem’s speaker visited her bedside, pulled back the veil, guided her hand over the page.

Poems from the poet’s thoughts of home invite us with visceral, concrete images into each moment. Such is the craft at work in this collection that bids us to see “that oil mixed with rain / in a hubcap is beautiful, which it is / because you own it,” and long years later to walk the land under great emotional weight and behold “as the entry shawls itself / in brilliant leaves, and the mountain beside me / pulls the sun’s deep brim down over its eyes” as though even the land feels the loss of things past.

Just when you think you know what sort of work will be encountered throughout, Fox introduces us to beautifully dimensional voices such as Mary Shelley, Josephine Peary (wife of the admiral), and Kathleen Scott (widow of the Antarctic explorer), whose voice becomes a masterful device to illuminate us regarding Scott’s expedition and those of George Mallory. This present Kathleen Scott handles with alacrity having been mistaken for the wife of Ernest Shackleton as well as how she might have sculpted Mallory had she not found “Everest / holding fast its own.” This author threads much sound insight and fact into these historical poems without ever drifting out of poetic voice—there again, as with us at the beginning, empowering Scott with agency to recount or rewrite history as she pleases. And it pleases.

With misery in the title, yes, there is loss in this book—loss not shared for loss’ sake but because its inclusion is essential. The losses are here, but the art and beauty of this work is not diminished by what is inevitable for us all. These poems stare into the face of that inevitable and seem to say “this, too can be beautiful.” To repeat Jane Ann Fuller’s words, “This poetry is flawless.” Here is where I must confess exceptional bias. Having begun reading The Company Misery Loves, I was pleased to find this collection includes some of my favorite works by Kate Fox. Finally, I get to share my excitement at how deftly she also wraps biblical icons in humor and contemporary sensibility. Poems from Fox’s book The Lazarus Method retell age-old stories with brilliance. In our varied experiences, there are poems remembered because they were assigned or were the subject of debate. There are poems we witness in live readings that echo the poet’s voice inside us for days. Then there are poems that are remembered because they refuse to be forgotten. The Company Misery Loves draws us into the unforgettable like “human branches reaching armless / toward their maker.”

Review: Rise Above the River by Kelly Rowe

November 10, 2023.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Michael Lavers

In Rise Above the River Kelly Rowe writes about her brother, whose Huck Finn boyhood–building rafts and climbing trees–was shattered when a teacher sexually abused him. Gone is the boy who cries “the world goes on forever–- // and I’m the king!” Instead we get a man in free fall, ramifying trauma outward. He wrecks cars, he steals his dying mother’s morphine, he drives right from her funeral to the bank to get his share of the inheritance, and then disappears. Eventually he commits suicide after a stint in prison.

Review: “What is our calling, after all, if not to be astonished?” Deni Naffziger’s Strange Bodies

May 1, 2023.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Bonnie Proudfoot

The initial poem of Deni Naffziger’s second full-length collection of poetry, Strange Bodies, can be seen as an introductory prelude. In it, readers sense a larger project, a way of making meaning that raises profound questions yet refrains from overstatement. “How fortunate for a leaf,” Naffziger writes, “to drop like wisdom/ from the arm of its mother/ to land without foresight or fear having lived only / ever /in the present.” Deftly, the poem moves from leaf to self, from self to consciousness, introducing ideas of wisdom, inheritance, time, awareness, choice, consequences. “How I am learning / that knowing is not real knowing /nor ignorance either / How choosing is a choice I’d rather not make sometimes / How not choosing/ is a choice I don’t know I’m making / How like the leaf I often land/ without intention/ but not without consequence.”

A Review of Melissa Febos’s Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

January 27, 2022.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Morgan Riedl

A body can work and do work in many ways—a body can also not work, or perhaps another way of saying this is a society can make it harder for some bodies to work, in which case a body itself can become work. Our body can be our life’s work—a body of work is the work of our lifetime.

In Melissa Febos’s recent essay collection Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, she investigates how bodies and writing intersect, how to tell the stories of our bodies and why we should. By mixing memoir and craft, Febos’s book does exactly the kind of work it argues is important, underscoring the power of the personal. I can’t help but think of the slogan from Second Wave Feminism here, the personal is political, and how today we might consider the personal is professional—that sometimes this binary, like so many others, subjugates certain bodies.

Review: Jessica Pierce’s Consider the Body, Winged

November 22, 2021.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Eric Stiefel

Jessica Pierce’s debut collection of poetry, Consider the Body, Winged (First Matter Press, 2021) is earnest, contemplative, and hauntingly elegant. Perhaps most importantly, the poems in Consider the Body, Winged are unflinchingly honest; they say what a less courageous poet might shy away from, what a less thoughtful poet might hide behind unnecessary flourish. Throughout the process of reading it, I found myself thinking of Jessica Pierce’s collection as a collection of meditations, each poem devoting its unfettered attention to the subjects at hand, from divinations and incarcerations to postpartum depression and lapsed faith.

The collection opens with a poem called “What do we know of endings?” (p. 13), which begins with an extended hypothetical: “And if the earth could gather up all / it contains, all its clouded greened / burning dusty torrential glory and grit…” the poem continuing on with bloated vultures and scrawny cats drawn into the image, new blues and crescent moons and wicked gods alike. Near the end, the poem turns toward introspection, asking if the world has room for “my grief / and my longing and your grief.” Then, after a pause, the poem makes a point to include “And maybe, / maybe, forgiveness.”

Review: Taylor Byas’s Bloodwarm

November 3, 2021.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Eric Stiefel

Taylor Byas’s debut chapbook, Bloodwarm (Variant Lit, 2021), does the work that a good chapbook should: It’s bold, concise, and daring, and it hones in on what it wants to say, collecting its poems as variations on a theme without spending too much time retreading worn territory. Bloodwarm dances between the formal and the formally engaging, from sonnets to pantoums to erasures, to poems written from the past, to poems written as voicemails, as highway exit signs.

The collection starts in media res with “My Twitter Feed Becomes Too Much” (p. 1), opening with a pair of violent images from 2020’s George Floyd protests against police brutality (and the further police brutality inspired by the protests). “I come across pictures of two rubber bullets / nestled in a palm,” the poem begins, later telling us “The caption reads These maim, break skin, / cause blindness.” These lines are contrasted with the next image: “Another photo—a hollow / caved into a woman’s scalp, floating hands // in blue gloves dabbing at the spill.”

Review: Jeanne-Marie Osterman’s Shellback

May 10, 2021.Reading time 5 minutes.

by: Eric Stiefel

Jeanne-Marie Osterman’s debut full-length poetry collection, Shellback (Paloma Press 2021), does the difficult work of using inventive and unflinching verse to deal with a lineage of familial trauma, alternating between the speaker’s father’s wartime experiences in World War II’s pacific theater, the difficulties of a childhood with a father who’s haunted by the war, and her aging father’s final days.

The collection begins with an explanation of its title (“shellback” is a nickname for a veteran sailor who’s been hazed through a violent initiation ceremony after sailing across the equator) and a poem called “Epilogue” (p. 13), which paints a portrait of the speaker’s father during the last days of his life. After opening with the lines “He’s losing his grip / Last Saturday night, / trying to shave for church.” While sitting in the dark, the speaker’s father asks her to read to him: “This is how we talk about death: / He asks me to read / the last part twice / where Sam’s frozen corpse / comes back to life.”

This move sets the stage for the rest of Shellback—a daughter trying desperately to understand the life of the man who raised her, a father who doesn’t know how to explain. Fortunately, Shellback isn’t afraid of dealing with challenging subject matter, whether the speaker is recounting kamikaze attacks her father survived during the war or navigating the indignities of her elderly father’s decline.

Review: Adam O. Davis’s Index of Haunted Houses

May 10, 2021.Reading time 6 minutes.

by Eric Stiefel

Adam O. Davis’s Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande Books, 2020) explores the spaces that contemporary America has left behind, from abandoned homes from the 18th century to dilapidated motels and empty trainyards. While Adam O. Davis’s debut, hybrid collection of original photography and poetry, Index of Haunted Houses focuses on ghosts and the places where they linger, its spectral figures never appear overtly. Davis leaves their presence to be sensed by readers as they explore the spaces of the poems in this book, which is often filled with white space and possibility.

Most of the photographs depict empty spaces or dilapidated buildings, empty trainyards, crumbling motels, an empty road and an open field with a sign that reads “PRIMITIVE ROAD, CAUTION, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.” The eerie tone of these black-and-white photographs resonates with the poems in the collection—something in America has been lost, though that something hasn’t truly left us.