Goldman-Sherman is a poet uniquely able to identify with the oppressed, knowing what it is to be controlled, fed lies while vulnerable, and used at the pleasure of another. If family can hurt family, it is because Abraham’s sons continue to live and die. Philadelphia can only survive and bear a courageous witness, sharing in ways the reader won’t easily forget.
Tag: poetry
A review of Gran Partita by Matthew McDonald
Gran Partita is a postcard from a rare place, a musician cum poet’s work, or rather a series of them. It ranges around the world as well as within the mind of a creative.It is an eclectic collection that bucks strict theming, opting instead to name its sections after classical movement forms that have a rough correlation, but allow for expressive musicality.
A review of Through a Glass Darkly by Libby Hathorn
Central to the work is the instability of what we see, how identity is shaped not only by what is visible, but by what is obscured or misinterpreted. The title’s allusion to partial vision comes through Evie’s growing self-recognition, rendered in language that is both delicate and exacting. Hathorn avoids overt dramatisation, instead trusting the cumulative power of small moments: a shift in tone, an image or character that recurs with altered meaning, from happiness in all of its forms, dreams, time, marriage and divorce, care and los
A Review of Perdido by MF Drummy
Drummy’s debut collection, Perdido, takes the reader through physical and emotional landscapes, revealing the bittersweet beauty of our real and metaphorical deserts. The backdrop of human loss sits behind the comforts that remain: the places we’ve been, the memories we hold, our loving relationships, and hope’s constancy glimmering at the edges.
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 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.