The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife
Joan Kane’s visionary first collection, The Cormorant Hunter's Wife, renders the Alaskan landscape without imposing a human meaning on life in the wilderness; in the process, Kane succeeds, more successfully than many contemporary poets writing about the natural world today, in preserving that landscape's distinctive and often keenly unsettling otherness. In the opening poem, "The Sunken Forests":
I recite the ice that has thrown
The river over its banks
And move through a terrain
Of annotations bright,
New and innumerable….
I will not know how
To forget them
Though I do not know why.
The speaker 'recites' the ice and in so doing the spare and simultaneously musical language takes the form of the landscape of which it is a part: 'bone-white,' 'inlaid with blue,' 'split at the consumed/root.'
Kane is also a playwright, and the first of the collection's two sections is entitled "Antistrophic." For the ancient Greeks, this is ...
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Fear of Moving Water
Alex Grant’s Fear of Moving Water is structured in four sections, and while there is no listing for this in the table of contents, each is preceded by a brief prose poem that serves as an introduction to the section. The collection moves deftly between the serious, the sublime, and the silly, sometimes melding all three into something shining and whole. Take, for example, this passage, which serves as an epigraph to the first section of poems, titled Bones & Confetti:
So we come here, to this haberdashery of words, apothecary for the faintly damaged. Well,
Wounded Elk, walk this way -- follow the voice leading you toward something, anything other
than that damned catechism of caterwauling you’ve suffered through the shrinking years of
bones and confetti -- The lights will go down and the yellow spotlight of the moon will pull
...
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The Little Box
When my instructor Timothy Liu insisted I read Vasko Popa’s The Little Box (translations by Charles Simic), I dutifully looked it up online and was ready to buy. After I found out the cheapest copy was 40 dollars, I decided against. A year later, I’ve taken the plunge, and what an investment. Vasko Popa incites the reader with near-riddles and an indeterminacy layered by the full-bodied sequencing of a white pebble, a little box, and a lame wolf.
His games in the rhymes, the simple subjects of “some,” “each,” and “one,” initiate the reader into a realm of reflection and springboard the reader into an individual experience. From “Last News on the Little Box” Popa dares us to find the real world amidst this fantastic one he has created:
The world from the little box
Ought to be inside
The last box of the little ...
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The Captain Lands In Paradise
Sarah Manguso’s book The Captain Lands in Paradise starts with an epigraph of the log of Christopher Columbus where upon Columbus sees a great harbor which could shelter “all the ships of the world.” Starting her small and well-written poetry book with a log from Columbus is asking to be called an explorer of a different kind, and indeed Ms. Manguso delves into the stars, into her childhood, into relationships in general. Some of the writing is beautiful, all is well done, but what I love about poetry is the emotional intensity and the leaping images and the outlandish imagination. There is no urgency or sense of emotion. It very much felt like a ship in harbor, being slowly rocked but not moved by the waves and standing its ground.
First the good. Everything is perfect in wording and structure. Manguso utilizes the prose poem well and offers a ...
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Hummock of Malookas
Matthew Rohrer’s debut collection, Hummock of Malookas, bristles with wonder and vitality. The straight and simple subject/verb sentences gives off no highfalutin airs. With the repetition of luminous forks and conjuring up apocalyptic fire, Rohrer livens a scene by jumping to the unexpected angle when you feel most comfortable with the poem’s direction. Utilizing sentence length variation and consistent anaphora for pacing and rhythm, Rohrer breathes life into inanimate objects that now act and talk and smell. Acknowledging the great theme of death and love as great poets do and should, Rohrer’s observations uniquely set themselves apart by harnessing a poetic coyness, seducing the reader into thinking he’s reading an everyday sentence when instead the reader is being led into a stark epiphany as in the end of “will the red hand throw me”:
The luminous fork knows that someday when I opened the drawer
I won’t recognize him ...
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Off the Fire Road
Poet Greg Wrenn is classically attuned, but not in any classical sense. His first collection, the chapbook Off the Fire Road, is a brazen, electric collection of poems exploring clandestine desire and tracking said desire amid the AIDS pandemic. On the one hand these poems track discreet sexual encounters along a fire road—a set-aside stretch of dirt traversing unwanted land, a place meant only to give access to somewhere else. But then there’s the other hand: before the reader can settle into the fire road motif—and it is very easy to fall right in step with Wrenn’s five to seven syllable lines and quick stanzas (he prefers the couplet and tercet)—once one is comfortable inside Wrenn’s meditations on passion in these times, one is then, perhaps, jostled into imagining a surgical procedure in which a man is fused with a horse, making centaur. It’s by this last surprise that I ...
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The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems
The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems spans thirty-four years of acclaimed writer Eric Pankey's literary career. Including excerpts from seven previous collections, as well as the more recent sequence "Deep River," this volume allows readers to observe the nuances of style and thematic continuities within this author's complex body of work. While already known for his precise and philosophical observations, Pankey's consistent use of the poetic image as a point of entry to larger questions gracefully unifies the representative pieces within this collection. In doing so, the poems within The Pear as One Example invoke barren landscapes and unremarkable objects, rendering them a gem-like concentration of subjective concepts, which shine with "arctic, oblique light" throughout.
In the earlier collections that are excerpted, for example, the Midwestern landscape frequently becomes a vehicle for Pankey's exploration of personal and spiritual origin, suggesting that such places and the things ...
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Twigs & Knucklebones
Sarah Lindsay’s Twigs & Knucklebones is an ambitious poetry collection, with its center section, “The Kingdom of Nab,” every bit as complex and substantive and satisfying as a stand-alone book (Copper Canyon and the Lannan Foundation rarely disappoint). The theme of the book is artifact, and Lindsay has made this topic exactly as broad and narrow as it should be. “The Kingdom of Nab” is an archeology dig spanning decades. Stories emerge in this section via the artifacts uncovered by generations of some reckless and other magnificently dedicated archeologists: a people’s history etched upon a clay tablet, a boy’s clay horses, bodies buried beneath a home’s floorboards, hand-molded jars, looms. These artifacts of the past are set against the CDs and automobiles of contemporary times.
In “What They Found,” the reader encounters Nummis-tet, inhabitant of Nab’s Late Middle Kingdom, the day she discovers “an eggshell, thin freckled ivory,/ broken ...
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Another World Instead
For William Stafford readers, the long awaited release of Another World Instead offers insights into the shaping of one of America’s most prolific poetic voices. From 1937-1947 arrives a collection of Stafford’s virtually unpublished poems that examines, as the title depicts, the author’s tenacious quest for envisioning a new way of life beyond a war he decried. At this volume’s core are impressions of what it was like to be a conscientious objector to World War II. For those familiar with Stafford’s later works, these rare poems are a re-introduction to the young mind of the poet as seeker, wanderer, and reporter. The other gift in this book is the fourteen-page introduction composed with care by editor, Fred Merchant, who conveys a deep understanding of Stafford’s life and work.
After being sentenced to the Civilian Public Service program, Stafford found himself in various work camps including, Los Prietos, California ...
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It was a terrible cloud at twilight
In her second book of poems, It was a terrible cloud at twilight, Alessandra Lynch offers readers a complex understanding of childhood, in which misfortune and loss often prompt a premature transition to adulthood. Filled with barren landscapes and abandoned playgrounds, the works in this collection frequently reframe narratives like fairy tales from a mature perspective, suggesting that even the most innocent phases in one’s life can become riddled with tragedy. Eloquently conveyed through her pairing of the philosophical with the everyday, Lynch’s poetry raises fascinating questions about the place of grief in everyday life, “brooding” and “glittering” all the while.
Throughout the book, Lynch continually revisits the transition from youth to adulthood, in which she depicts a burgeoning consciousness of the possibility of loss. Frequently conveying this theme through imagery of the natural world, Lynch gracefully mirrors her speakers’ internal conflicts and realizations in descriptions of the landscapes ...
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