The grittiness of New York City, with its painful solitude but also its joyful exuberance, rules this collection. From a shabby walkup in Harlem to a swinging nightclub in Greenwich Village, for cab drivers, musicians and for all of us, jazz rules over this domain, and it thrives in Carragon’s poetry.
Category: Poetry Reviews
A review of Gopal Lahiri Selected Poems selected by Sanjeev Sethi
This carefully curated selection reveals Gopal Lahiri as a poet of remarkable range—equally attentive to ecological precarity, linguistic fragility, philosophical inquiry, social consciousness, and the intimate afterlives of memory. Moving seamlessly across expansive meditations and compressed lyrical forms like haiku, Lahiri crafts a poetic universe where language becomes both witness and wound, archive and awakening.
A review of Fragments of an America Volume II by Chris McNally
One can immediately tell through the vulnerabilities captured in the collection that McNally is a heart-on-the-sleeve type poet. With this second volume, he chronicles the life of the worker across a landscape of American politics that lays bare personal grief alongside a public manifesto. He laments the fractured reality of the present day with deep moral seriousness. While the politics are pointed, they never come across as partisan screed.
A review of Sacred Remnants by Charles Freyberg
Sacred Remnants explores aspects of Freyberg’s past and the links between colonisation and gentrification and the ways in which history and culture can be fractured by the impulse to sanitise, exploit and commercialise. The book is divided into three parts. The first, Mavericks and Divas, focuses heavily on the colourful characters of Kings Cross who impacted directly on Freyberg, like burlesque and strip tease performer and painter Elizabeth Burton, a frequent subject of Freyberg’s work.
A review of Gardening on Mars by Jane Frank
The title, Gardening on Mars, intrigues. Will it involve intergalactic insights? A theme of cultivating plants in our challenging soils? Motifs of extraterrestrial landscapes? Not quite, as Jane Frank’s third poetry collection does take us travelling but with a substantial focus on the interconnected environments of our inner and outer worlds. It is Earth that is walked and returned to us via Frank’s rare choice of images sequenced with unexpected details.
A review of Keeping Room by Ann E. Wallace
Ann E. Wallace’s third book of poetry, Keeping Room, examines what it means to live with illness and beauty. And neither has strict borders in Wallace’s beautiful and haunting poems. The illnesses she addresses are not only her own, or her loved ones, but the sickness and depravity of the world we find ourselves in now.
A review of Now-Then: New and Selected Poems by Mike Ladd
Now-Then shows just how much Ladd has done and the ways in which the work has transformed and progressed over the years. His older work still feels fresh and it’s a pleasure to be able to read generous selections of multiple books in one place. His newer work is rich with a maturity that allows for the lightest touch and the deepest thought. Whether in the Bolivian Mountains, Java, driving along the Huon Highway or in an Adelaide suburb, Now-Then is full of consistently transcendent and powerful work.
A review of Farhang Book Two by Patrick Woodcock
What makes Farhang Book Two such a powerful achievement is the way it unites global experience with the emotional terrain of Nunavut and the Arctic. Every remembered country and conflict passes through the stillness and isolation of the North before reaching the page. The result is a collection where geography becomes inseparable from psychology, and where memory itself behaves like tidewater beneath ice: shifting, returning, impossible to contain.
Thin Reed Throat by Damien Becker
Suffice to say, Damien does not shy away from difficult topics. But what I appreciated was that he doesn’t get cloying or guilt-trippy about the relentlessness of living with a chronic condition, the suffering, the endurance, or the witnessing of his friends suffering too. He lets the imagery do the heavy lifting. And it’s the very simplicity of statement, the lack of adornment in the stark truth, that hits even harder.
Intimacy, Perception and the Body: On Lauren Camp’s Took House
Many of Camp’s poems resist conventional punctuation, allowing sentences to extend across lines in a continuous flow. This produces a reading experience that is both immersive and destabilizing: one is carried forward without pause, yet never fully grounded. The effect recalls what White describes as poetry that is not merely like interior life but is interior life—language as the direct articulation of thought and sensation before they cohere into narrative.