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Everything Awake: A Review

September 18, 2023

by COLIN DEKEERSGIETER   Sasha Steensen, Everything Awake (Shearsman Books, 2020), pp.90.  Sasha Steensen’s Everything Awake is a poetry driven by the vertigo of life’s work, maintaining a legacy begun by Hesiod and continued by — to name a few …

Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action: A Review

August 19, 2023

by KYLAN RICE   Jordan Dunn, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (Partly Press, 2022), pp. 84. In a chapter on the lumber industry in Man and Nature, Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864), the American …

A Long Time to Be Gone: A Review

August 8, 2023

by KYLAN RICE   Michael McFee, A Long Time To Be Gone (Carnegie Mellon, 2022), pp. 72. In a notebook from the 1930s, Robert Frost wrote out a recollected line from the poet Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica”: “A poem shouldn’t …

“History / And Fear”: A Review of Sleeping as Fast as I Can by Richard Michelson

June 26, 2023

by KYLAN RICE   Richard Michelson, Sleeping as Fast as I Can (Slant, 2023), pp. 88. In Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno tempered his often-quoted claim that it’s “barbaric” to “write poetry after Auschwitz,” conceding instead that “perennial suffering has just as … Read more

Indigo: A Review

April 17, 2022

by ELLIE RAMBO   Padgett Powell, Indigo (Catapult, 2021), pp. 223. If I were to start the review of this book the way many of the essays within it begin, I would open with a personal story, which by the third …

Syncopated Sensibility: Review of Sevastopol

March 31, 2022

by CELIA LEGBAND HAWLEY   Sevastopol, Emilio Fraia, New Directions Publishing, 2021. Possibly the best advice I can give you about reading Emilio Fraia’s 2018 novel Sevastopol is: Do not let your first reading be your only one. The South American …

Bewilderness: A Review

March 23, 2022

by BEE GRAY-ARMY   Bewilderness, Karen Tucker, 2021, 288 p. In our current moment, addiction is as familiar to most Americans as a regularly scheduled television program. In fact, 22 million people are currently suffering from active substance use disorders …

The Naomi Letters: A Review

February 28, 2022

by MARY SIMS   Rachel Mennies, The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021). Rachel Mennies’ The Naomi Letters opens with a question, an invitation to devotion: “The love poets say suffering is relative, but would they pull a plane whole / from …

Night Rooms: A Review

February 17, 2022

by DONAL MACADAM   Gina Nutt, Night Rooms (Two Dollar Radio, 2021). Gina Nutt writes that horror in film is “a reaction, recognition, a response to a call.” Nutt is the author of the poetry collection Wilderness Champion and two chapbooks— “Here …

The Fugitivities: A Review

January 29, 2022

by SHANA SCUDDER Jesse McCarthy, The Fugitivities (Melville House, 2021).   Jesse McCarthy’s debut novel The Fugitivities asks the weighty and perhaps unanswerable question: what does it mean to be Black? Is it a static form of identity which one carries across …