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.
Author:
Poetry in Misalignment: A review of locust blindfold stompchant rain by Neil Flory
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.
A review of Egrets, While War by Tishani Doshi
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.”
We Bombed in New Haven; Alamogordo, New Mexico; in Hiroshima, too: A review of Trinity by Emily Seyl
Seyl, a science writer and editor at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s National Security Research Center, has organized a coffee table book to end all coffee table books. Trinity: An Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test, replete with more than 300 carefully restored photographs, maps, blueprints, and formerly top-secret documents, goes where no book has gone before.
A review of Mirage of Burning Things by Ryan Di Francesco
If you’re looking for poetry that explores the dystopia we’ve woken up in, poems that remind us we’re all animals even when we write and dream, Mirage of Burning Things will be affirming, even as it releases you as disturbed as when you arrived. Parlyaree Press is winking, knowing we’re all on the platform, but the trains have stopped running.
A review of Neolithic Imaginings by Loralee Clark
This is a vast and ambitious collection which is totally imaginative and unlike anything I have read. After reading Neolithic Imaginings, I look at the night sky wondering about my place in that sky and my connection to those who stood full of hope among the stones, dwarfed by their immeasurable mystery and beauty.
A review of Good Girl by Holly Coleman
This is a chapbook to read aloud, to read to a lover, or to read alone as an act of self-pleasure. In her essay(s), Coleman strives for clarity as she navigates the strict rules of syntax she must master in order to go free—she is a woman expected to say certain tame things who instead writes the forbidden correctly.
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A review of The Rod and the Rose by John Richardson
If, as Will Shakespeare once said, all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, then Jayadev John Richardson’s vivid and highly accessible autobiography, The Rod and the Rose lifts the curtain on a personal drama that is operatic in scale. The path of his life has formed an arc so extraordinary that we ideally need to track it from the upper circle. Don’t worry, you won’t need rose-tinted spectacles.
A review of Days & Chances by Joanna Klink
Klink’s writing is carefully measured, with a cadence that pulls the reader forward persistently. Strong emotions contain just enough curiosity to ground the flow. Her line breaks feel so natural, it’s tempting to forget they once had to be carefully determined. This morning, the sun still rose, but it will set tonight with more poignancy. The rain, like the stages of grief, pounds, weeps, self-sooths, and endures.