Category: Poetry Reviews

A review of The Storm by Mark Lipman

Lipman’s poetic style is obviously drawn from his world travel and experiences interviewing different people, seeking new adventures, and gaining an intimate knowledge of wide-ranging cultures and beliefs. This has given a unique perspective to his poems.

A review of Tender Machines by J. Mae Barizo

It is a book of personal revelations and truths, some raw and shocking that are intimate to the core. It is a book about women contemplating their fate in what still seems to be a man’s world. It is a book about loss of self in a country that was a coloniser of ancestors. It is the feeling of not knowing who you are and where to hide.

A review of See What I Mean by Charles Rammelkamp

What a delicious literary emporium See What I Mean is, with treasures waiting to be unearthed and read.  In this age of the hermeneutic and precious, Rammelkamp gets down to the itty-gritty of poetry and existence using the language of real people to help us see the complexities and complicities of our lives.

A review of The Unreal City by Mike Lala

There is a lot of muscular movement in Lala’s poems. The poet’s interest (almost what seems to be an obsession) in labor and work defined through movement can be read in My Receipt, a poem about him being a spectator in a theater: “… his knees, his body at work, / part/ of a sum / (a company): men together — their bodies / in labor together, / for whom the audience puts their hands together”.

A review of The Lady in The Bottle by Rozanna Lilley

Lilley is a brilliant writer. She creates pictures with words. Each episode is a short gem with sprinkles of captivating humour. Page by page we enter Jeannie’s life, we read about her travelling with the astronaut in a space capsule, a yacht or a car, we read about her trying to constantly please her master, and forever hoping to get married to him.

A review of Time Taken: New and Selected Works by Les Wicks

A poetic journeyman and warrior whose work in writing and community throughout his life crisscrosses the globe. His beautiful new book Time Taken – New & Selected is a compendium of that life, full of treasures – wisdom, observations and raw evocations of the man himself.

A review of Dancing Dots by Brenda Eldridge

There are poems in this collection that describes events which many of us experience like waking at 3.00 am and being unable to go back to sleep, or being super tired after looking after children or admiring a fancy car that we never could afford. Empathy, love, compassion and wishes are also themes in this collection.

A review of The Hurricane Book by Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones

Acevedo-Quiñones includes family trees and freely admits that some of her facts are speculation, sometimes pieced together from “drunken spill sessions,” hearsay, half-remembered conversations. “Secrets are our family members, too,” after all, as she wisely points out in the vignette, “Secreto.”

Conjuring the Artist: A review of The Daughter of Man by L.J. Sysko

L.J. Sysko’s Daughter of Man is an exquisite dance in which form, function, image, and metaphor shape a discernible allegory of embodied personae. And while these speakers delight the reader with a variety of references to pop culture, they also serve as reminders of our shared historical narratives, ones we cannot let slip from our cultural memories.