F O R K   & PAGE

“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

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

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

“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