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
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"
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
