Fragment and Shore: Interview with Jennifer A. Reimer by Piotr Gwiazda
In Keşke (Airlie Press, 2022) Reimer explores the theme of migration through the lens of her European sojourns, especially in Turkey and Denmark, but ultimately hers is a story of linguistic migration, as is clear from the following interview. As Mia You notes on the back cover, through its attention to the movement and fluidity of language, Keşke offers the generous and generative space of the necessity and impossibility of translation.
Review of Emily Ransdell’s One Finch Singing by Jennifer Dorner
Like a cup of spiced tea, or like a stiff dram of whisky in an ice-cold highball glass on a rainy night when your faith has seized up inside you, the poems in Emily Ransdell’s debut collection, One Finch Singing, arrive like comfort from a friend.
Review of Alissa Hattman’s Sift by Jan Priddy
Dedicated to the author’s mother, Sift by Alissa Hattman is the story of leaving a mother behind, of seeking safety, and of climate despair. The narrator escapes her life in a damaged world by joining The Driver. Together they head overland to water, to sand, to stone, to river to desert to mountain to shore and to green.
Review of Bethany Reid’s The Pear Tree by Colleen Hull Gray
Reid chronicles stories of her life on a farm in Southwest Washington and the three generations of her family who lived there. The house we grew up in was large, multi- / syllabic. It babbled and raved / in more than one language. (“A Haunted House”).
Review of Diane Raptosh’s I Eric America by Debbra Palmer
In more than forty brilliantly innovative sonnets, Raptosh makes the connection between personal and national trauma. A family is shattered. A nation is rocked. In the process she names names, assumes a role, and points to the broken parts of a damaged collective body.
Review of Jayne Marek’s Dusk-Voiced by Lisa Low
Jayne Marek’s lovely, thoughtful, deeply intellectual new book of poetry, Dusk-Voiced, offers the pensive reader twenty-four philosophical meditations not only on the nature of nature, but on humanity’s often troubled relation to it.
Review of Lucy Ives’s An Image of My Name Enters America by Justine Payton
Vulnerable and intimate, An Image of My Name Enters America reveals how we become—oftentimes unknowingly—a reflective image of the dominant forces around us.
Review of Jules Jacob and Sonja Johanson’s Rappaccini’s Garden by Suzanne Langlois
To open Rappaccini’s Garden: Poisonous Poetry is to step through a wrought-iron gate into an enchanted place. The chapbook, a collaboration between master gardeners Jules Jacob and Sonja Johanson, is structured like a botanist’s field notebook.
Review of Erin Carlyle’s Girl at the End of the World by Lisa Boylan
Girl at the End of the World, a collection of poetry by Erin Carlyle, plunges the reader into the depths of memory, trauma, and the search for identity. Each poem serves as a poignant vignette, exploring themes of opioid addiction, childhood, familial relationships, broader environmental grief, and the struggle for survival.
Review of Jen Karetnick’s Inheritance with a High Rate of Error by Susanna Lang
How do you keep going when you know that the world is hurtling toward disaster? If you’re Jen Karetnick, you write.
Review of Alice Templeton’s The Infinite Field by Trina Gaynon
The Infinite Field brought me to a new understanding of what it means to find one’s bearings. The phrase is not just a statement of where Alice Templeton stands but of how each of us is located in relationship to people, places, and time.
Review of Stephanie Clare Smith’s Everywhere the Undrowned by Laurel Ferejohn
Smith’s beautiful memoir, the first in UNC Press’s new literary nonfiction series Great Circle Books, leads us through her fourteenth summer and beyond. That summer of 1973, her mother went on a road trip, and she was left to spend six weeks at home alone in New Orleans. On the fifth of July, a man with a knife abducted her in his truck.
Review of Merridawn Duckler’s Arrangement by Rachel Barton
This book of thirty-five fictions includes voices glib, clever, stoic, cynical, and profound. The narrators are alternately marginalized, disillusioned, suicidal, vulnerable, playful, or imaginative. We see the author as a child, a preteen, a teenager, sister, and mother.
Review of E.D. Watson’s Via Dolorosa and Advent Wreath by Jonathan Fletcher
Imagine a pilgrimage in which the person on it admits at the beginning that she is no longer sure she believes in God. Imagine a pilgrimage that is littered with as much doubt as it is certitude. Imagine a pilgrimage that does not culminate in spiritual enlightenment but instead violently and irrevocably decenters the speaker, allowing for the most necessary of corporeal experiences (ironically, à la Jesus’s kenosis) and profound embodiment.
Review of Amelia Díaz Ettinger’s These Hollowed Bones by Brenna Crotty
I am not a bird person. Reading through each of the nearly fifty poems named after a different bird in These Hollowed Bones, Amelia Díaz Ettinger’s fourth collection, I recognized maybe a quarter of the species. Yet Ettinger’s direct and observational language drew them to life effortlessly before me: a mischief of magpies descending on a skunk carcass, the white-crown sparrow a fat brown scoundrel with prison lines on her head, and the black-capped chickadees, after a blizzard… speckl[ing] / the blinding snow with dee-dee-dee.
Review of Andrea Potos’s Her Joy Becomes by Ingrid Andersson
A brown-haired child in a red-petal dress twirls away from the viewer through a blur of poppies: one glance at the newest book of poetry from Andrea Potos, Her Joy Becomes, reveals a portal into this poet’s world.
Review of Jessica Pierce’s Consider the Body, Winged by Debbra Palmer
In Consider the Body, Winged, we meet someone very special even before the first poem begins. It’s Pierce’s nine-year-old self, to whom she dedicates this book: Thank you for being brave enough to say, I am a poet. Here is our first book. I love you.
Review of Rachel Barton’s Jacob’s Ladder by Merridawn Duckler
Lately I’ve been entertaining myself with notions about a particular division—poets that look out on the world and those that look inside themselves. Barton’s wonderful Jacob’s Ladder brought me to a third category, for this is a poet that looks inside herself and sees an entire world. As the titular poem of the collection puts it, her voice is singing on the inside.
Review of Rebecca Faulkner’s Permit Me to Write My Own Ending by Brenna Crotty
Permit Me to Write My Own Ending, Rebecca Faulkner’s harrowing collection of poems, exists almost outside of time. It is not a narrative trajectory of a single speaker, yet the I dominates the landscape of her work, a litany of first-person perspectives so that each poem could be spoken by any girl, woman, or mother at any time.
Review of Judith Barrington’s Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs by Marie-Elise Wheatwind
Internationally known poet, professor, and writing teacher Judith Barrington’s new book, Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs, is a gathering of fourteen prose pieces, published previously in journals, now edited “to make them one longer narrative.” It is an important memoir encompassing second-wave lesbian, feminist, creative, academic, and political communities. Barrington’s activities and explorations stretch from the United Kingdom and Europe to the United States, where she eventually settled in the Pacific Northwest.
Review of Molly Kugel’s Groundcover by Alison Turner
If collections of poems are plots of land, then Molly Kugel’s debut collection, Groundcover, is my type of terrain. There is botanical expertise here but only as a twining with the speakers’ memories. The past coils around the present; history covers the ground and the ground covers something else. Most of the collection’s poems are free verse in a variety of stanza formations between one and two pages long.
Review of Debra Magpie Earling’s The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Beth Russell
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, Debra Magpie Earling’s second novel, is a stunningly crafted, linguistically intricate, morally challenging resilience narrative. The power of the book–like the spell cast by the author’s voice–emerges from the marriage of courage and complexity. Calling into question much of what we believe we know about the past and suggesting that this past has rapidly emerging implications for our future, the book is prescient, compassionate, heartfelt, and breathtaking.
Review of Lisa B’s God in Her Ruffled Dress by Bethany Reid
Toward the beginning of God in Her Ruffled Dress, the poet is commanded, Write me, write me, write me, and Lisa B writes—lines clenched between her teeth like a bridle’s bit or the pit of a sour cherry. From its provocative title to the last sentence, this strange, heretical book surprises, devastates, and delights.
Review of Rebecca Brock’s The Way Land Breaks by Bonnie Proudfoot
The typical cruising altitude of a Boeing 737 passenger jet is around 37,000 feet. From the porthole on a clear day, the topography is a series of patterns and shadows. Air travel provides a sense of separation from day-to-day intensity, yet for those who enjoy the view, there is a chance to parse out the geologic, seek out texture and patterns, draw upon the perspective that seven miles above the earth can bring.
Review of Rebecca Turkewitz’s Here in the Night by Jan Priddy
Rebecca Turkewitz offers thirteen stories in Here in the Night that are all too convincing in their darkness. Women hear voices, are confronted by indignant owls and toothless children, are granted illusions of safety and then abruptly find their certainty guarantees nothing. Ghosts squat in an elevator, wait on railways, and are revealed in lightning. Women are lonely, looking for work, looking for family, comfort, partners, home.
Review of Brandi George’s The Nameless by Autumn Newman
Open The Nameless and you are immediately submerged in an overwhelmingly lush and surreal world:
Dear creatures from the underground, nematodes, earthworms, tangles of synapses, dirt symphonies, the ruffled collars of pea-green lichen who sing only about the sea, indigo air humming with moon-strings.
Review of Rebecca Goodman’s Forgotten Night by Linda Kalaj
Each space a contemplation of the illusionary night. Dusk must meet night and night must meet dawn. The space between night and dawn may seem still, forgotten, suspended, but nothing about night can be forgotten once darkness meets light. Rebecca Goodman’s Forgotten Night embarks on a journey of remembrance.
Review of Elizabeth Majerus’s Songs Are Like Tattoos by Sibyl James
Because so many poems in this collection carry titles and bits of lyric from the songs on Joni Mitchell’s Blue album, I donned my earbuds and listened to Mitchell perform them. Perhaps because my mind was so suffused with them, I found myself hearing the rhythms and lilt of Mitchell’s voice in the music of the poems by Majerus. I had been looking for some kind of dialogue between the songs and poems; I found a duet instead.
Review of Jaya Stenquist’s Animal Afterlife by Brianna Flavin
I read this collection shortly after the sudden death of one of my best friends. I picked it up, even though I didn’t feel any spark for art. I started reading in the bath. Then I was on the bathroom floor, water cold, a little shocked to return to myself in human form, holding a book.
Review of Suzy Harris’s Listening in the Dark by Brenna Crotty
Listening in the Dark is a slim chapbook, but that by no means makes it slight. Hard of hearing her entire life and fitted with a cochlear implant in her sixties, Harris takes the experiences of deafness and—with stark language and no end of gentle humor—creates tightly woven poems that explore the difficulties of communication, the expansiveness of silence, and the wonder at hearing sounds for the first time.
Review of Emily Hockaday’s In a Body by Sarah Cedeño
To read In a Body by Emily Hockaday, for me, was to come to terms with the conflicts human souls have with our bodies throughout our lives. It makes us starkly aware that we are not the same as our bodies, that we might exist outside of our bodies, but acknowledges that, as living beings in a material world, we do not.
Review of January O’Neil’s GLITTER ROAD by Chase Browning
January O’Neil’s Glitter Road (2024) in some ways continues the lyrical arc that began in her two previous collections, Misery Islands (2014) and its follow-up Rewilding (2018). But her latest collection is distinguished by something else: poems that deftly merge form and content, and the tangible and profound effects that relocating from Massachusetts to Mississippi has had on the author and her writing.