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.
Tag: poetry
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 Shapeshifter in Love: Marie de France’s Yonec and Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve’s The Beauty and the Beast translated by Katharine Margot Toohey
The story progresses quickly and even though we are well-aware of the outcome – the happily-ever-after ending is no spoiler here – the emphasis on Beauty’s own agency makes for a richer tale and one where the morality of beauty and love being more than ‘skin deep’ has deep resonance.
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 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.
A review of Even Time Bleeds by Jeannette L. Clariond
Spiraling, as metaphor and embodiment, the isolation of the spiral, is the collection’s center. On the invented face of “The Other” who lived and died and is resurrected, as Paz wrote, are “the wrinkles of that face./His wrinkles have no face”; for Clariond’s invented face, with the same fervor of a body negating its own being, “the river in which we see ourselves tells a lie: the light/of the word will forever remain a force of absence:/a radiance flowing past the edge of sight.” The book, full of edgeless radiance, more a body than the body.
A review of New Cemetery By Simon Armitage
These lines progress like steps, gently but persistently moving forward at a walking pace, keeping, as Armitage says in “Moths”, with his “frame of mind” and “length of stride” at this time of life. The overall effect is soothing and reverent, taking on the quiet progression of his subject matter, a new cemetery built near Armitage’s home in West Yorkshire. He also invites us to see each tercet as a winged moth: “two wings and a body part” or at least moth-like in the poem’s fragile diminutive nature.