Beauty, love, and humor are all on display in Shirley Brewer’s charming new collection, Goddess of Swizzle. The collection, a banquet for all the senses, is divided into five sections whose titles metaphorically appeal to the tongue and nose – A feast for here and now, Thick brushstrokes garnish the menu, The moon could use a little more sugar, Limburger – a fragrance fierce as love, and Even the green Spanish olives lighten up, all lines taken from one of the poems in each section.
Category: Poetry Reviews
A review of Golden Armor by Armenida Qyqja
Golden Armor by Armenia Qyqja, a full-length poetry collection of a 111 pages, is an empathetic, ingenious, heartfelt, and passionate manuscript full of feministic candor, by an Albanian poet, showing readers how and what it means to stay alive mentally, physically, and emotionally during and after war.
A review of Dear Letters in the Red Box by Sarah Stern
Sarah Stern’s book Dear Letters in the Red Box is an invitation into her family. We grieve with her over the loss of her elderly and ponder the insights she gleans from the past. This is a book of memories. Themes of light, alienation, surrender, knowing and not knowing, are explored in love-filled snapshots of family members, primarily her mother, also a poet.
A review of The Distance of a Shout by Michael Ondaatje
What this collection confirms is that Ondaatje is, beyond all, a master storyteller, largely through his ability to capture character with the same precision he chooses words. Each personality presented here, be it a blurred face in a photo or a close friend or lover, draws us in.
A review of Identifying the Pathogen: An Inquiry by Jennifer Militello
Militello weaves different perspectives into the collection, sometimes stepping away from the point-of-view of the main persona and drawing parallels with her own life and of women today. She looks at the persona from the angle of both subject and object, introducing what it feels like to undergo surgery and calling it an autopsy report.
A review of No One Knows Us There by Jessica Bebenek
Brilliantly and realistically, Bebenek narrates no turning point, reaches no culminating moment, offers no conclusions. The final poem sends the reader back to the beginning and the inescapability of death. Rooted in concrete images, the poems resist both pious moralizing and maudlin regret by honestly depicting an embodied self, enmeshed in the empirical world. With economy and specificity, Bebenek’s lines embrace the totality of experience.
A review of Seang (Hungering) by Anne Casey
Casey explicitly frames the calculated brutality of British rule during the Great Irish Famine not as a natural disaster but as a colonial crime. Like a visit to the “Scarcity Commission” (p30), the mechanisms of tyranny return like blight to the nation’s rotting potato crops. This is a poetry which witnesses starvation; it witnesses religious and cultural bans, and ultimately, it is witness to the systematic removal of children.
A review of Hollywood or Home by Kathryn Gray
Gray’s poems are inspired by singers and poets as well as actors and filmmakers. “Testament” is addressed to Brandon Flowers, the lead singer for The Killers, also playing on time and sex and staying relevant as time moves on. A couple of poems are inspired by the legendary bluegrass Carter family, and another by Johnny Cash (“The Cave”: ‘Ends make fiction of our means. Johnny said it: he wasn’t lying.’). “Watermelons” is another poem for a late poet/musician, Michael Donaghy.
A review of Smart Fish Don’t Bite by W. D. Ehrhart
It is not uncommon for writers who write about a war they served in to be typecast, much like an actor relegated to one role. Smart Fish Don’t Bite, Ehrhart’s new book, challenges the assumption that he just a “Vietnam writer.” By any measure, the poems in Smart Fish … bridge the intimate and the global, they are thoughtful, honest (a precious commodity in our time), and consistently memorable. They will reward every reader’ attentions.
A review of Beast: The Lost Chronicles by Paul Stubbs
If it seems that the 19th century never ended it’s because the deepest questions it raised either haven’t been answered, or have been answered in a way that makes us uncomfortable. In Beast—The Lost Chronicles Stubbs shows that he understands this, and doesn’t shy away from allowing his sequence to provoke the metaphysical discomfort it reflects and challenges.