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F O R K & PAGE

Fork & Page: A Year in Review

Fork & Page: A Year in Review

Last week Fork & Page turned one years old! It was illuminating to look back at all the reviews I had written over the past year for Fork & Page, a total of 24 reviews of poetry collections. I’ll note, over the past year my reviews have gotten longer, a little less personal, and more in-depth as I learned more about the possibilities of reviewing, and as I deepened my own understanding of critical theory. (I worry this means my posts are less fun to read, but I hope not, as I

Through the Looking Glass and Beyond: Fast by Jorie Graham

Through the Looking Glass and Beyond: Fast by Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham is a master orchestrator of thought; her poems have always treated thought as a kind of entity. Graham has studied this entity and given it a language that floods, eddies, pivots, and unfolds, and yet that language is elevated beyond thought’s actuality, which is transformed through this mimesis. But what if Jorie Graham’s entity—made up of a single person’s thoughts—met another entity, a bot, full of the encyclopedic knowledge of the internet as well as the user

American Toxicity: Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith

American Toxicity: Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith

How does one wade in the water, when the water is toxic? The current United States Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith, approaches this question in a variety of thought-provoking ways in her profound fourth collection, Wade in the Water. The water Smith considers is literal, political, historical, and metaphorical: the water we drink, the culture we are steeped in, the history we carry with us, and the spirituality imbued in our everyday lives. With a deeply critical mind, Smith pr

A Remarkable Persona: Barbie Chang by Victoria Chang

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

Brazen Hope: Ramshackle Ode by Keith Leonard

Brazen Hope: Ramshackle Ode by Keith Leonard

“Never mind / the last exhale. Think / about the first. And the second.” These lines which grace the ending of Ramshakle Ode distill the intention of this collection: to know intimately the erasures of death, and yet choose to turn towards the brilliant wonder of new life, of fertility, perseverance, and growth. Keith Leonard’s poems in Ramshackle Ode are steeped in a hard-won joy; reading this book is to widen your vision, and accept the “brazen pulse” of your own “dumb” hea

Unframed: Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl by Diane Seuss

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

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

A Solitary Gaze: Eye Level by Jenny Xie

A Solitary Gaze: Eye Level by Jenny Xie

“Suffering operates by its own logic. Its gropings and reversals. Ample, in ways that are exquisite.” I am inclined to agree with Jenny Xie’s assessment of suffering, and to add that her poems too operate in this way, by their own logic, and are ample in ways that are exquisite. Ample in language, sensory perceptions, in complex thought and originality; her long prosaic lines slide languorously across the page throwing piercing glances that are at once profound and mundane. T

Survivors’ Lyrics: Registers of Illuminated Villages by Tarfia Faizullah

Survivors’ Lyrics: Registers of Illuminated Villages by Tarfia Faizullah

One definition of register is “the range of a human voice or a musical instrument,” and in Registers of Illuminated Villages, Tarfia Faizullah gives us the full range of her musical voice. The poems in her second collection move fluidly from the lyric to the plain-spoken, from her own voice into the voices of others, from tightly crafted stanzas to words loosened across the page like scattered seeds. And like seeds, Faizullah’s adroitly chosen words contain within themselves

Desire as Desire: Meet Me Here at Dawn by Sophie Klahr

Desire as Desire: Meet Me Here at Dawn by Sophie Klahr

Desire and longing are the undercurrents of nearly all great literature, and yet rarely are these emotions given flesh as sinuous and muscular as in Sophie Klahr’s Meet Me Here at Dawn. “Imagine an orange, cut into slices, on a plate on a bed / on a night in April, under the slow clicking fan,” the reader is compelled to imagine this Magritte-like image, where the body is the orange, sliced into the pieces by the observer, and served up by the observed. The repetition of "on"

New Ways to Howl: Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar

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

Diagram of a Tongue: Silent Anatomies by Monica Ong

Diagram of a Tongue: Silent Anatomies by Monica Ong

Silent Anatomies by Monica Ong is unlike any book of poetry I have ever encountered. It’s no wonder Joy Harjo selected it as the winner of the Kore Press First Book Award. An amalgam of poetry and visual art, of family history and feminism, of diagrams and mixed media, in it Monica Ong not only dissolves the boundary between poetry and art, but also the boundary between the heart and the mind. Ong uses her heart to search through her family’s history for clues of what it has

Imaginary Worlds: Our Lands Are Not So Different by Michael Bazzett

Imaginary Worlds: Our Lands Are Not So Different by Michael Bazzett

Michael Bazzett’s second collection, Our Lands Are Not So Different, defies classification, it exists in its own world; a world seen once in a child’s dream, the model of which was constructed by “savants in the attics of Vienna.” One can detect influences or predecessors: Mark Strand, Jorge Luis Borges, children’s fables, and perhaps even certain sci-fi writers; and yet Bazzett’s imaginary cities are his own unique construction. Bazzett’s poems which often operate like fable

Why I Blog about Poetry

Why I Blog about Poetry

When I first started this blog, I didn’t quite know what it would become. I looked for a formula, but there was none. I thought I might post every single Sunday, but then life intruded, rubbed its fur against me and insisted on being pet. And yet, sitting down as many Saturdays as I can and writing these reviews gives me the greatest of pleasures. Reading books for review is like spending time with new friends, trying to figure them out a little, but also just listening, lett

Nature’s Hem/Hymn: Ornament by Anna Lena Phillips Bell

Nature’s Hem/Hymn: Ornament by Anna Lena Phillips Bell

An ornament is meant not only to adorn but to set off the beauty of the person it is placed on or the room it is placed within, but what if the ornament itself is an expression of nature, a lily perhaps like the lilies that burst through Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s poems: daylilies, waterlilies, trout lilies. Phillips Bell in her debut poetry collection Ornament, which won the Vassar Miller Prize, places a crystal in nature, setting off the beauty of the natural world: honeysuc

The Ghosts Within Us: Kamilah Aisha Moon’s Starshine & Clay

The Ghosts Within Us: Kamilah Aisha Moon’s Starshine & Clay

It is difficult to write a review when words are failing you, when you feel like the only way to respond to a book is to write poems to it. Prose, with its obsession with logic feels lacking when it comes to discussing Kamilah Aisha Moon’s transcendent yet earth-bound collection Starshine & Clay. As the title suggests, these poems are trapped between the soil, clay, and dirt beneath us, and starlight; between the body that is laid to rest beneath us and the lost spirit that s

Bridled Fauna: Like a Beast by Carly Joy Miller

Bridled Fauna: Like a Beast by Carly Joy Miller

In the chapbook, Like a Beast, Carly Joy Miller interrogates the ways in which the beast is tamed: bridled, harnessed, handled; the beast is put to work until it is led to the slaughter. In Miller’s succinct and razor-edged poems, the human world dissolves into the animal; they can no longer be distinguished from one another. In “Nightshift as Horsebride” the bride is bridled and yet brimful with desire; she resents her husband turned handler until he removes her harness. Her

Grief is a Question: How to Prove a Theory by Nicole Tong

Grief is a Question: How to Prove a Theory by Nicole Tong

“Given / the practice to call things gone, / how shall I speak of the line, / which neatly remains?” This question is at the heart of Nicole Tong’s haunting debut collection How to Prove a Theory. Through variations in line, Tong incants the dead, her elegiac poems long to give form to a grief which is never static, but always searching for theories. The line, though varying in length and type, remains as a kind of proof of existence. The line ultimately gives order to the ch

Untamable and Unnamable: Orogeny by Irène Mathieu

Untamable and Unnamable: Orogeny by Irène Mathieu

The word “orogeny” comes to us via Ancient Greek words meaning— mountain and genesis, and refers to the geological process through which mountains are created. In order to create mountains, however, the earth’s crust must be deformed, a rupturing occurs, one tectonic plate crumples against another and is forced upwards. The violence inherent in this word is deepened by Irène Mathieu’s introduction to her debut collection Orogeny, in which she describes Pangaea, an earth godde

A Starling’s Song: Forest Primeval by Vievee Francis

A Starling’s Song: Forest Primeval by Vievee Francis

“Something has snapped in two. Something has been lost / that won’t return in this life. I want to find the source.” It is not just the source of the pain, of the howl, of the bitterness of a white winter that Vievee Francis is searching for in her luminous collection Forest Primeval, but rather the source of the original life— the wild wholeness, the unbreakable spirit that society attempts to break. Francis opens her award winning collection with an antipastoral poem in whi

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CREATED WITH LOVE BY ANITA OLIVIA KOESTER

Hello! Reading, writing and cooking are my passions, so I decided to start Fork & Page as a brunching with books blog.

Besides being a blogger, I am also a poet, photographer, editor, and author of four chapbooks.

If you enjoy reading this blog post consider subscribing or sharing on social media!

Happy Reading!

Anita

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