The poem diverges from the wistful, reflective joy of the wedding to the speaker’s own more volatile personal history, contrasting the innocence of the little girl singing karaoke and her own “vanilla ice cream” sweet girlhood. The speaker’s “I” creates a new emotional tenor for the poem, and the use of polysyndeton to connect clauses blurs time, creating one rich, expansive moment that contains the feelings of the speaker’s past, the reality of her present, the little girl’s identification, and Swift’s artistic influence, not to mention the reader’s own emotional resonance with the poem itself.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of One Little Goat by Dara Horn and Theo Ellsworth
This collaboration with Theo Ellsworth is unique. Ellsworth’s style is reminiscent of R. Crumb, the underground comics pioneer whose iconic black-and-white cross-hatching and the exaggerated features of his character are instantly recognizable. Combined with Dara Horn’s erudition, the comic book style makes the ancient story seem somehow more relevant and more subversive.
A review of A Prague Flâneur by Vítězslav Nezval
The streets, bridges, buildings, and cafés “where Prague lives” provide a wealth of stimuli to which Nezval responds with a catalogue of memories. His Prague is like the site of an archaeological dig whose layers expose various periods of personal history. It also is the site of shops whose windows display goods that take on hallucinatory appearances, and the setting for chance meetings with strange characters and events that touch on the uncanny.
A review of Informed by Alison Stone
The poems are raw and pull the curtains back to reveal intimate family dynamics and heartbreak. Death was real and claimed a young neighbor and she wonders about an afterlife and “starved myself to safety, transcendence”. With no real example of how to live, she had to “transcend”, “starve”, develop an eating disorder as a way to survive the death and destruction around her that was felt and yet hidden, unspoken, unacknowledged: “under tablecloths,/the makeup”, stashed in the “trunk of a new car”.
A review of The Ballad of Falling Rock by Jordan Dotson
The Ballad of Falling Rock is a stunning book that follows at least four generations of a family in the Appalachian region near Virginia and in tiny towns and forests. If you are a Hemingway fan, this one’s not for you. Or, if you are a Hemingway fan but maintain an open mind, you can read it and set yourself on a path thick with adjectives.
The Rhymes and Reasons of James Sale: A Review of DoorWay, Vol. 3 of the English Cantos
James Sale is not using “lazy rhyme;” he is deliberately, carefully stretching the boundaries of what is acceptable rhyming convention in English formal poetry. He uses his slant rhymes, half rhymes, near rhymes, assonant rhymes, consonant rhymes, light rhymes, and syllabic rhymes with abandon. With joy. With freedom. Lavishly. He is demonstrating that our language is a language that by default doesn’t always perfectly rhyme— but when you get close, it can be as beautiful, and powerful, and in many instances, more effective than a perfect rhyme can ever be.
A review of The Bayrose Files by Diane Wald
Diane Wald crafts a richly atmospheric and emotionally layered narrative, exploring themes of identity, guilt, and redemption through Violet’s journey of painful self-discovery. Vividly capturing both the familial eccentricities of an artistic community and the complexities of human relationships, this tender, unflinching story follows Violet’s struggle for self-forgiveness, becoming a moving testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
A review of Everything Must Go by Dan Flore III
In the flash fiction of Dan Flore the conflict could go either way, and often, to his readers’ benefit, it does. Everything Must Go does indeed entertains, and often his protagonist’s pain is his reader’s pleasure. The poet and memoirist John Yamrus’s introduction gives readers a good perspective on Flore’s work.
A review of Habitats: Poems by Katharine Whitcomb
In Habitats, it is with an accessibility and elegance that Whitcomb transports readers onto the highway, staring back in the airplane, switchbacking on the trail and across the harbor ferry. Habitats opens the aperture, disclosing intriguing moments in a rich atmosphere of spaces crafted with wonderfully strange detail.
An Uneasy Utopia, Bright yet Bloody: Jordan Rothacker’s The Shrieking of Nothing
The story connects in many ways to its predecessor, 2020’s The Death of the Cyborg Oracle, but stands on its own as a wild, conceptual, playfully written ride. And though hints of Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and Aldous Huxley abound, it is utterly original—principally because its world is neither utopian, nor dystopian, but somewhere uniquely in between.