Category: Poetry Reviews

A review of Girl at the End of the World by Erin Carlyle

Each poem serves as a poignant vignette, exploring themes of opioid addiction, childhood, familial relationships, broader environmental grief, and the struggle for survival. Carlyle skillfully captures the disorienting experience of losing a complicated father to addiction while the world itself seems to be unraveling. 

Where the Time Goes, a review of Knowing by Mark Cox

Perhaps all of the aforementioned influenced the distinct voice in Knowing, a voice that probes and wonders, laments and celebrates. Three central ideas are: The past is good, the present is better; fate coexists with human will; and time is unstoppable, art stops time.

A review of Shocking the Dark by Robert Lowes

Scant need to explain the theme. Here we have a wistful reflection, one of the attendants of faith. The question of evil is difficult enough; here we touch upon the divine conscience. And it’s even in an almost 10-9 meter, save for the final line. Almost.

A review of Little River of Amazement by Mary Kay Rummel

Mary Kay Rummel’s universe is vast, but as “Ars Poetica” spells out, she focuses on the world around her with a keen attention to detail. The title, indeed, says it all.Little River of Amazement comes from one of the new poems, “December Bodies,” in the first of her two-part suite of new work, For the Speechless World.

A review of The Homesick Mortician by Peter Mladinic

There is an urgency to this breaking down of line structure, often bridged by run-on thoughts strung together by comma fasteners. It is a compelling style, one that makes the collection very readable at a quick clip. In some cases, as with the first poem, structure reasserts itself at the end with a strong strike upon the bell of reality: “They brought him home.”

A review of The Djin Hunters by Nadia Niaz

Nature makes her presence felt in many pages, particularly birds. There is a beautiful poem titled “A Time of Birds” in which we read about the hoopoe with its black-tipped orange crest bobbing against misted grass.