Woodard’s sections are simultaneously beautiful and prosaic, terrifying and enraging. The workers are mostly women, many immigrants who spoke little English yet were still forced to testify in English, despite there being an available translator. The women’s conditions, both in the workspace and also as humans, are on full display in the courtroom, and Woodard opens the door for readers to understand the workers positions.
Tag: poetry
A review of Fifty Miles by Sheryl St Germain
Reading Fifty Miles brought me to tears a few times, but St Germain courage and determination inspired me and made me reflect as a mother. Fifty Miles is a book that won’t disappoint readers.
A review of My Skin its Own Sky by Gillian Swain
My skin its own sky is an intensely honest book, one that doesn’t shirk at going into dark places or sharing what is unbearable. But always, and throughout this gorgeous collection, in every poem, there is a moment of transformation, where pain becomes beauty. This is the power of the work—by looking and exploring these domestic, broken, and charged moments with the clarity of a poetic gaze, Gillian Swain gives them back to us whole.
A review of Knitting Mangrove Roots by Kerri Shying
Shying’s themes are powerful and topical, exploring violence, drug use and dealing, parenting, ecological destruction, disability, prejudice, and sensual joy. The mix is natural and compelling, working through a distinctive voice intensely, sometimes painfully honest.
A review of Shrapnel Maps by Philip Metres
An Arab-American who feels strongly about the Palestinian homeland, Metres clearly sees the complexities in the region and reflects them so succinctly and comprehensively in his poems and prose sketches, reflecting the good and bad on both sides.
A review of Fire Front: First Nations Poetry and Power Today edited by Alison Whittaker
Fire Front is critically important reading – not just for the messages it contains, though they are both timeless and relevant to the world we’re living in right now, but also because this is work that is fresh, urgent, astonishing, beautiful, and heart-rendering and have the power that Whittaker talks about in her introduction, to change the shape world for the better.
A review of On Reflection by David Musgrave
On Reflection is a novelty. It is beautiful, delicate and memorable. The collection sweeps along philosophising possibilities, inventing life with breath-taking consciousness. In its own right, it reminds us to remain centred—in a word: read Musgrave.
A review of A Constellation of Kisses edited by Diane Lockward
You don’t have to be a card carrying poetry lover to fall in love with the poems in this book. I’m planning to put the anthology on my coffee table and look forward to the conversations it sparks with guests. (That is when we are allowed to have guests again. I am writing to you from the heart of social distancing.) Some of these poems turned me on. Some of them made me long to be the person being kissed for the attention and tenderness of it. Some of them made me cry.
A review of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor by Melissa Crowe
This intricate mixture of joy and grief, celebration and fear, is expressed over and over again in these poems. In “Damage,” a poem about her young daughter mistaking the words damn it for damage, the poet reflects, hearing her daughter’s mistake when she stubs her toe or startles when a door slams, “damage [is] the right word.
A review of A Kinder Sea by Felicity Plunkett
Though these are personal poems, rooted in love, loss, grief, and rebirth, there is a strong, though subtle underlying politic which takes the form of advocacy. Collective empowerment is an important theme throughout the work, linking back to the title–kindness as a radical act.