Reading Alchemy will excite your imagination. You will travel in a magic carpet to the past and present, the vivid images in the poem will become a painting in your mind. I advise: read each poem a few times and you will, with each reading discover layers of beauty and humanity.
Category: Poetry Reviews
A review of Give a Girl Chaos by Heidi Seaborn
The book is called “Give a Girl a Chaos,” but the sub-title is “and see what she can do.” As I was reading this book, I started to hear in my mind Holly Near’s song “Fight Back,” an anthem I used to sing at rallies. Like Near, Seaborn is triumphant and resounding about women surviving chaos. She shows us that the girl who has been through chaos can catch the joy in every moment and overflow with love.
A review of Poems of bay, beach & harbour By Margaret Owen Ruckert
The reader will encounter in Ruckert’s poems rich imagery and profound reflexions. The musicality of the tanka awaken the reader’s imagination. Going through the pages is like visiting Sydney beaches from Botany Bay to Manly, we get a glimpse of the beauty that surrounds this town.
A review of Arsenal / Sin Documentos by Francesco Levato
Levato declutters (and de-bullshits) the pages with margin-to-margin mark-outs with a thick-ass Sharpie. His omissions reveal the national publications’ foundational intentions—to legally dehumanize and inflict harm on Latin American bodies in the name of the American state. This book is going to piss you off.
A review of Thread, Form, and Other Enclosures by Carol Smallwood
It is a collection to be read again and again, as each reading offers new ways of seeing and thinking, threads, forms, and other the enclosures appearing before us, evolving, changing shape and ultimately presenting us with new insights.
A review of Daddy by Michael Montlack
Beautifully written, these haunting poems pay tribute to brave men who were thrust into the AIDS crisis, and in the midst of fear and death, supported each other in hospitals across America. There are poems about first dates, Valentines, vacations, and break-ups. There is also a lot of humor in this section, through curious and endearing situations that are entertaining to readers of all sexual orientations.
A review of No Spider Harmed in the Making of this Book Edited by Cherry Potts
Editor Cherry Potts created a masterful work of art with this anthology, intricately combining poetry, short stories and flash fiction that spans a variety of themes. In all of the works, the writing is accessible, yet beautiful. The otherworldliness of spiders brings about bewitching language in almost all of the entries.
A review of Catastroika by Charles Rammelkamp
If you, my reader, like history and poetry you will love Catastroika, a fascinating book in which the poet, in narrative form, covers a century on Russian history from the point of view of two characters: Maria Rasputin, the daughter of the much maligned Russian spiritualist Rasputin and Alexander Federmesser, a Jewish man who goes by the name of Sasha.
A review of The Beating Heart by Denise O’Hagan
O’Hagan does a beautiful job of describing the Italy of her childhood—the buildings, fountains, news items, a walk with her parents, conversations, cobblestones, the loss of a friend, or a roadside drive. There’s a sense that every detail is both intensely private, and absolutely important—a universal artefact that must be shared with the reader
A review of The Minor Virtues by Lynn Levin
I don’t usually consider virtue amusing, but Lynn Levin’s new book of poetry The Minor Virtues had me laughing out loud. In a reading I attended, she called it her most cheerful book yet. She said she wanted to focus on not the big virtues like patience and temperance, but what she called the minor virtues that she elicited from paying attention to small moments and looking in deeply.