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
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
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
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
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
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
“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
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
“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
A Woman’s Acreage: Blackacre by Monica Youn
Poetry often benefits from a poet’s previous career or occupation. Some of my favorite collections were written by doctors and nurses because those writers understood the body on another level entirely, and brought that knowledge to their work. Monica Youn did not work in the medical field, but was rather a lawyer, yet still she uses this experience to reimagine the body as a possession, one that can be stolen from us. In a blog post for the Poetry Foundation, Youn explains t
