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.
Category: Poetry Reviews
A review of Katabasis by Paul Juhasz
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.
A review of Defensible Spaces by Michael F Drummy
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.
Cathedrals of Mind: a review of saint of by Lisa Marie Basile
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.
A review of Forever Mistaken for Ourselves by Jenny Grassl
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.
A review of Conversations In A Café by Nadia Janice Brown
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.
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.”
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.