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.
Tag: poetry
A review of Spellbook of Ordinary Mistakes by Jane LeCroy
That is to say, we may get a glimpse of the Jane LeCroy who grew up in Nyack, New York, in the shadow of the Tappan Zee Bridge looming in the distance, but the real Jane LeCroy is as elusive as the butterfly we think we’ve captured when we pin it to a board.
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 Opus: A life With Music by Pip Griffin
Griffin is a poet of philosophical refinement and linguistic delicacy, the poems in this collection are also compelling and wise, each poem a seed planted in a garden of beauty.
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 Owning the Not So Distant World by Grace Cavalieri
Grace Cavalieri is by turns as sagacious and oblique as a Zen koan, her verses brimming with aphoristic wisdom, and also charmingly chatty, like your best friend in the world, oscillating between aloof and intimate but always appealing.
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 Zero at the Bone by Christian Wiman
Poetry gives suffering form, and giving suffering form is an antidote to despair. Yet content matters, too. For Wiman, much confessionalism is “an idolatry of suffering…an outrage that no person (or group) has suffered as we have, or simply a solipsistic withdrawal that leaves us maniacally describing every detail of our cells.
A review of Therapon by Dan Beachy-Quick and Bruce Bond
Throughout this masterful book of collaborative poetry, the theme of Otherness is explored, whether through naming the nameless or gathering and disseminating the knowledge that the naming gives us.
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.”