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.

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.”

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:

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.

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.

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.