What makes Splashed Things such a strong collection is the utilization of the visual metaphor of splashes and water as an explanation for loss and grief. From poems on the physics of splashes to Doc Edgerton’s photography, Lucas returns to this again and again with grace and poise.
Author:
The Pioneer of Consciousness: A review of IRØNCLAD by Marc Vincenz
Within the broader canon of modern poetry, Vincenz occupies a fascinating and increasingly important position. His work emerges from traditions of surrealism, deep image poetics, ecological lyric, and international modernism, yet it also pushes beyond them into something distinctly twenty-first century: a poetics of fractured global consciousness.
A review of If It’s True by April Krassner
Krassner’s playful and poignant memories seep through nibbling poems inviting the reader to find a comfortable chair and a cup of tea. If the sun is shining brightly, we’re reminded that clouds also linger — there are shadows on these floors and walls. The past is inspected and questioned.
A review of Rite of Spring by Kris Kneen
Kris Kneen new book, Rite of Spring, is delightful, strange and bizarrely sexy. The title hints at awakening and that is one of the key themes in this book, which teases and tricks the reader with its silky narration, fast plot, and the beautiful conjunction of suspense and rich inner dialogue.
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A review of What Mennonite Girls Are Good For by Jennifer Sears
It’s a high-stakes adventure, with planes, guns, pervs, and the gyrations of a goddess in disguise. At the end of the day, it’s a short story collection about religious syncretization, told with a voice of winsome aloofness that makes funnier-than-hell into its own corner plot in heaven.
An Interview with David Zindell
I learn that Zindell, now 73, plans to keep writing, keep creating in his Neverness universe. On a bright May morning in Denver, we talk about writing, old friends from the Northern Colorado Writer’s group, Nietzsche, AI, grandpas, and philosophy.
A review of Hybrid Heaven by Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss
Hybrid Heaven is more polyhybrid than hybrid. Like much of Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss’ work, it moves across disciplines, cultures, identities, genres, and styles to create poetry that is distinctive and striking. The poems engages with memoir, African mythology, music, migration, colonisation, and perhaps above all, the role that language has to play, both in creating and unmaking the cultural constructs that frame our lives.
A review of Extinction Song by John James
There is a particular kind of helplessness that arrives with parenthood: the moment you hold something new and fragile and realize, with full clarity, what kind of world you have brought it into. John James knows this feeling well, and in Extinction Song, his Snowbound Chapbook Prize-winning collection from Tupelo Press, he does not pretend to have survived it with any wisdom intact. This is not a book about what to do. It is a book about what it feels like to watch, and to love anyway, and to keep watching.
A Review of Patricia Carragon’s Stranger on the Shore
The grittiness of New York City, with its painful solitude but also its joyful exuberance, rules this collection. From a shabby walkup in Harlem to a swinging nightclub in Greenwich Village, for cab drivers, musicians and for all of us, jazz rules over this domain, and it thrives in Carragon’s poetry.