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Judith Skillman’s Oppression contains language—rich, allusive, and whip-smart, filled with mordant humor—that is easy enough to parse. What makes the poems so difficult, so oppressive, however, is the profound and wrenching emotional weight they carry.
Kite is a poet, musician and actor and has worked as a journalist and in human rights domestically and all over the world. All of these experiences inform his writing and bring an authenticity, edge and poignancy to the work.
Juhasz exhibits his intimate but troubled relationship with words throughout the book. His katabasis consists of lived experience. Words cannot do it justice, yet they provide necessary tools to make meaning. Juhasz writes in a literary register, typically employing sentence syntax and grammatical subordination instead of compressed poetic lines.
Sherbrooke deftly portrays trauma as something that can fracture identity, creating a painful divide between Veronica’s outward appearance and her private experience. She feels guilt as a wife and fear as a mother while carrying the shame of the teenage girl she once was, often referring to her younger self as though she were a separate person.
Melancholy, haunting, wistful on the sad end of the spectrum — content, confident, wise. This is 
Michael Drummy’s new collection of bittersweet poems, Defensible Spaces. The silly years of youth have passed, and the late summer flowers are waving. Sobriety is our watchword as twilight approaches. The poet’s eye is taking it all in.
Aside from suffering devastation of home, illness, and severe bodily injury Basile continued to write and explore her craft. The poems are acts of resistance against the tyranny of pain and self-inflicted guilt. By sublimating her treacherous moments in language of ritual and metaphor, Basile restores her balance and defines the life she deserves as psychic trauma is expunged.
While Grassl doesn’t define women (who can), her collection captures the essence of women’s spiritual and metaphysical being. She portrays women as part druid, animal, spirit, land and water, in short, women full of desire, capability, and knowledge. The collection presents women in their endless poetic variety of roles, shapes, sizes, forms, connections.
Despite being a collection of poems, the book doesn’t sound monotonous and is full of various themes and styles, which Brown has complemented with quotes and images in several instances. These intertextual elements did not just come off as random ways to break from the poems but relevantly complemented the book’s overall theme.
Here, understanding the compositions through perception is recommended. It is nearly cinematic and tied to specific moments that are constantly unsettled and incapable of solidifying harmoniously. In one lens, the image of the metaphysical poet appears. In another, the weathered-down court jester.
In the title poem of her new collection, Tishani Doshi juxtaposes violence with timeless endurance, patient resolution with destruction, almost like a manifestation of Shiva, the creator/destroyer god of Hinduism. She writes about the ongoing “dirge of loss recovery / loss loss loss,” but assures us that “Our task is to march on.”