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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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 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"
