That importance Dzieglewicz felt to write the book resonates in the world and on the page. The reader feels it from the jump: the foreword and timeline of events — which gives the reader the necessary historical and cultural context upfront, unlike many collections — and the first poem, which takes place a year after she left camp: “though / the river is not untouched, still, it squalls with life.”
Category: Poetry Reviews
A review of At the Mercy of the Flies by Matt McBride
The opening set of poems, like the whole book, becomes a page-turning link, from poem to poem, strengthened by the absence of explicit titles. The narrator explores his past lovers through a dream lens and expresses disappointed regret in his failure to form predictable emotions. We quickly catch on — this collection is the song of a visionary, the call of a man sorting out tough things with a jazz band jamming behind him.
Diving at the Moon, Poems by Kevin Gallagher
I am fascinated by what and whom Gallagher met in the 8th century, CE. Du Fu (712-770) is still considered the greatest poet. Lin Zexu (1785-1850) was a government official who held the highest Confucian ideals, intelligence, and loyalty to the country and people. He tried to end the opium trade with England. His efforts failed.
A Review of Splashed Things by Leigh Lucas
What makes Splashed Things such a strong collection is the utilization of the visual metaphor of splashes and water as an explanation for loss and grief. From poems on the physics of splashes to Doc Edgerton’s photography, Lucas returns to this again and again with grace and poise.
The Pioneer of Consciousness: A review of IRØNCLAD by Marc Vincenz
Within the broader canon of modern poetry, Vincenz occupies a fascinating and increasingly important position. His work emerges from traditions of surrealism, deep image poetics, ecological lyric, and international modernism, yet it also pushes beyond them into something distinctly twenty-first century: a poetics of fractured global consciousness.
A review of If It’s True by April Krassner
Krassner’s playful and poignant memories seep through nibbling poems inviting the reader to find a comfortable chair and a cup of tea. If the sun is shining brightly, we’re reminded that clouds also linger — there are shadows on these floors and walls. The past is inspected and questioned.
A review of Hybrid Heaven by Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss
Hybrid Heaven is more polyhybrid than hybrid. Like much of Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss’ work, it moves across disciplines, cultures, identities, genres, and styles to create poetry that is distinctive and striking. The poems engages with memoir, African mythology, music, migration, colonisation, and perhaps above all, the role that language has to play, both in creating and unmaking the cultural constructs that frame our lives.
A review of Extinction Song by John James
There is a particular kind of helplessness that arrives with parenthood: the moment you hold something new and fragile and realize, with full clarity, what kind of world you have brought it into. John James knows this feeling well, and in Extinction Song, his Snowbound Chapbook Prize-winning collection from Tupelo Press, he does not pretend to have survived it with any wisdom intact. This is not a book about what to do. It is a book about what it feels like to watch, and to love anyway, and to keep watching.
A Review of Patricia Carragon’s Stranger on the Shore
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.
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.