A Remarkable Persona: Barbie Chang by Victoria Chang
Seamless, is the word that lodged in my mind as I read Victoria Chang’s melodic poetry collection Barbie Chang. Not only do the poems move effortlessly from sarcasm to sincerity as the words cascade down the page unimpeded by punctuation, but the entire collection flows with such a graceful intelligence, it would not be a stretch to call it—flawless. Flawless in the way that no poem feels out of place, and each of the poems build upon each other creating a single narrative ar
Unframed: Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl by Diane Seuss
Within stillness there is movement, just as within silence there is noise. These opposing forces have the power to reveal one another, to reveal not only how they oppose one another but how they conjoin. The poet is in many ways a vehicle of awareness, but also, when we dig deeper, the conjurer of motion and noise, perhaps this is why poets, like Diane Seuss, are fascinated by stillness and silence. Seuss considers stillness and silence, allows for their implications, and the
American Gothic: All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned by Erica Wright
In the Midwest, people are afraid of death, they ignore it until they can’t, they tuck it away in little boxes in their attics, they buy roses for the funerals with all the thorns pre-cut. But Erica Wright’s poetry collection doesn’t take place in the Midwest where I grew up, it emerges from the Southern Gothic tradition where, let’s face it, all the bayou stories do end with the word—drowned. In Wright’s second collection, death arrives in a thousand and one forms: from tsun
New Ways to Howl: Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar
While reading Kaveh Akbar’s marvelous debut collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf, I was reminded of a quote from Dan Beachy-Quick’s essay “The Hut of Poetry,” “A poem initiates us into death, so as to awaken us into life, into this world that requires new eyes to see.” Akbar’s poems do just that, they hover near death in order to jolt us awake by throwing not only knives and blood our way, but also rosewater and the sweetest of figs. With these new eyes we encounter the sacred an
