Gatza’s book is continually cooking up new experiences, exotic taste treats, and sensual liaisons in celebration of living life from top to bottom and back again. Somehow his America is always there front and center, in the big city wilderness, the desert expanse, or sleepy small towns leaning under the shade of trees. He has developed a keen eye and ear for using the right word at the right time in the right way.
Category: Poetry Reviews
A review of Red Camaro: Poems by Dwaine Rieves
Rieves knots subjects together: moments of closeness, lack of friendship, learning to tie knots, rain, what the Bible says, pitching tents, sounds of rain. Thoughts do not happen in isolation; one leads on to others concerning a gesture, an action, a sight. In Rieves’ poetry, the reader’s mind travels with him. Is this “free association?” It is an exploration of a poetic mind, a mind that observes objects, places, people, and itself.
A review of Chronicle of Drifting by Yuki Tanaka
Tanaka, who teaches literature at Hosei University in Tokyo, teases out the etymologies of Japanese words throughout. “Two words for ‘heart.’ Kokoro means heart in a moral, spiritual sense,” he writes in one of the “Chronicles of Drifting” prose fragments, “it never refers to the organ. Shinzo, it always does.”
A review of Essence By Thuy On
The short poems throughout Essence work perfectly for the discrete subject matter and are easy to read, but the simplicity belies the depth of this work or the way it interrogates language and the impact it has. Readers will enjoy the many literary references and links throughout the book, and the way in which On collates external sources with a sensual framework. Essence is a pleasure to read, beautifully written, funny and often deeply moving.
A review of Twelve Days from Transfer by Eleanor Kedney
Twelve Days of Transfer tells the story of Kedney’s own unsuccessful attempts at carrying a child, the complex emotional responses to the inability to conceive, the guilt, the grief, but also the relief. She writes about her experiences in grief support groups and with friends, as well as her own complex IVF experience.
A review of Clarion by Jenny Pollak
This book is a poetic and visual artistry, it is also a love song shaped from nature’s elements — sand, salt and time. Pollak reminds us that sticks, though broken, remain strong, wild and full of untamed beauty, capable of profound acts of resilience and grace.
A review of Mycocosmic: Poems by Lesley Wheeler
Wheeler’s ideas synthesize unusual word groupings; from these combinations new qualities emerge, such as unpredictably jarring, sometimes funny internal and end rhymes, line breaks, and punctuation, not unlike the way speakers of a language are able to generate an infinite number of sentences from a finite set of syntactical rules.
A review of The Four Faces of Eve: A Tribute to Survival by Connie Boyle, Brooke Granville, Petra Perkins, and Gail Waldstein
I speak for Colorado when I say we see the weathering/ weathered faces on the cover of this book of poems because these poets have faced the sunshine, the rain and the freezing cold of life. We treasure this wall of women we may not know, yet we feel we do know them. They are our Eve, the source of all life, who eat the forbidden fruit, take God’s consequences and live to tell us about it.
A review of In The Thaw of Day by Cynthia Good
Good’s poems catch and return with these moments of praise and gratitude balancing the tension with hard-fought lessons and observations of resiliency from the natural world. Her poetry combines language that is intensifying and evocative, like a personal diary, with the immediacy of a scrapbook. And it’s this personal baring open and honesty that lingers on making In The Thaw of Day a dynamic collection.
A review of As If Scattered by Holaday Mason
Mason quickly shifts into an influx of embodied imagery and sensuous detail; absorbing love poems, lush and erotic, are further enlivened, countered by a more objective perspective as landscapes of the natural world magnify the intimacy of Mason’s poems. The meditative poetic interchange using briefer lines, airy lineation and informal erasure drew me in through breath and space, encouraging a contemplative atmosphere.