Poetry of any kind isn’t for everybody. Indeed, according to the National Endowment for the Arts and the US Census Bureau, roughly 9.2% of U.S. adults (approximately 22.4 million people) read poetry in one format or another. While only 1% to 5% of total poetry readers (roughly 200,000 to 1 million people nationwide) read in what we might call the experimental, avant-garde, or gender-interrogating categories of poetry that this book would fall into.
Category: Poetry Reviews
A review of In Common Things by Jefferson Singer
Shining gems of individual phrases adorn every page, yet the meanings of the entirety of some of the poems eluded this knucklehead reviewer … until reaching the final three pages of Notes. Consider bookmarking those Notes, to refer to them either before or immediately after reading each poem.
A review of Of a Certain Age by Tricia Gates Brown
Brown’s reverence for the natural world is another unifying theme of this collection. In “Resilience” she speaks of carrying a table out back and noticing things. She is nourished in the noticing, and we are fed by the usual images she gifts to us. She attends to the world around her great love.
A review of Dreamboat by Jeffrey Skinner
We enter the collection meeting the speaker as he experiences a bout of insomnia during a river cruise in Germany. The Rhine River transforms into a pack of stampeding dogs of various breeds. Logic does not rule—the poems are untethered, capable of moving anywhere at any moment.
A review of In the Shadows of Service by Cynthia Hamilton Urquhart
Urquhart allows the stories to unfold, tell themselves with few scattered phrases across the page. This technique allows the reader to inhabit the scene. Suspense and pathos are constructed line by line, slowly building as the reader begins to grasp the enormity of the scene’s significance, the weight of these life altering moments.
A review of Oppression by Judith Skillman
Judith Skillman’s Oppression contains language—rich, allusive, and whip-smart, filled with mordant humor—that is easy enough to parse. What makes the poems so difficult, so oppressive, however, is the profound and wrenching emotional weight they carry.
A review of Sad City by Craig Kite
Kite is a poet, musician and actor and has worked as a journalist and in human rights domestically and all over the world. All of these experiences inform his writing and bring an authenticity, edge and poignancy to the work.
A review of Katabasis by Paul Juhasz
Juhasz exhibits his intimate but troubled relationship with words throughout the book. His katabasis consists of lived experience. Words cannot do it justice, yet they provide necessary tools to make meaning. Juhasz writes in a literary register, typically employing sentence syntax and grammatical subordination instead of compressed poetic lines.
A review of Defensible Spaces by Michael F Drummy
Melancholy, haunting, wistful on the sad end of the spectrum — content, confident, wise. This is 
Michael Drummy’s new collection of bittersweet poems, Defensible Spaces. The silly years of youth have passed, and the late summer flowers are waving. Sobriety is our watchword as twilight approaches. The poet’s eye is taking it all in.
Cathedrals of Mind: a review of saint of by Lisa Marie Basile
Aside from suffering devastation of home, illness, and severe bodily injury Basile continued to write and explore her craft. The poems are acts of resistance against the tyranny of pain and self-inflicted guilt. By sublimating her treacherous moments in language of ritual and metaphor, Basile restores her balance and defines the life she deserves as psychic trauma is expunged.