It’s hard to pigeonhole Rabbi Irwin Keller’s collection into a genre, but I’ll call these poems and meditations Creative Non-Fiction, the convenient label of “CNF.” He takes an incident and expands it, rabbinic-style, into a parable, a moral lesson, a life lesson. They are mini-essays. They are sermons.
Tag: poetry
A review of The Zombie Family Takes a Selfie by Ed McManis
Many of the poems are metapoetic, exploring both the nature of what the poem is doing and can do, while deftly moving through mythology, Biblical texts, dreams and fantasies, while always grounding the people and settings in a casual domesticity. This may seem like a contradiction, but McManis manages the balance and shifts perfectly
A review of Informed by Alison Stone
Alison Stone’s poetry is a sheer delight to read, not just for the cleverness and elegance of her verses or for the insights to which we can all relate, the regret that we all recognize often comes with the territory of memory, but for the infectious positivity her poems ultimately exude.
A review of Dandelion by Heather Swan
This is eloquent language. I find Swan’s syntax convincing and superior to many eco-poets I’ve read throughout the past decade. Her “Crop Duster” carries forth, in poetry, the very concerns Rachel Carson presented in prose in the 1960s and prior. Swan’s “Crop Duster,” (Pg.32-36) written in eight enumerated sections, tells of spraying used to suppress the gypsy moth, of an immune-compromised child, a lump in the girl’s neck.
A review of Steerage by Robert Cooperman
Cooperman’s narrative proceeds with something of the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, all three children under Big Nathan’s thumb, Rivka and Simon the chorus supplying the agonizing commentary in their strophe and antistrophe. When Big Nathan promotes Moshe from the role of enforcer, beating up the delinquent shopkeepers, to prizefighter, Moshe starts to come into focus as Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.
A review of By This Time—Poems by Ian Ganassi
By picking out what was a random unnoticed cultural fragment and placing it before us, the poet is not presenting it as a truth but is assigning it value: this bit is worth paying attention to, he’s telling us, even though doing so yields no clarity and brooks no complacency.
A review of The Loneliest Whale in The World by Tom Hunley
Throughout the book, the poet offers a view of life that is full-throated and built around generosity, tenacity, openness to joy and to wanderlust. He asks us to shake up our complacency, to be fierce and open to seeing things through a different lens. It is an urging to live life fully even in the midst of circumstances that are harrowing.
A Review of Penultimates: The Now & the Not-Yet by Thomas Farber
Farber rarely lets the reader take a breath through the entire collection. Whether he’s starting his explorations with “Re William Blake (1757-1827)” or “Neighbors” or “School Days,” there’s every chance he’ll segue to another seemingly unrelated topic, although he generally connects them in the end.
A review of Wild Pack of the Living by Eileen Cleary
The words are sharp; they make the matter of fact description of the act of abduction feel like tearing off one’s fingernails. It would be hard to read this without holding one’s breath in fear.
Ghost Tones: A Review of Diane Mehta’s Tiny Extravaganzas
I found myself first reading Mehta’s poems on a sunny, hot, false summer October day and listening to my neighbor’s music that swirled up and over my fence and into my yard. It was strange music–ghostly.