Lighting the Shadow opens itself to a space of meditation in an attempt to grasp the tensions of beauty, terror, and transformation within the self and the greater world
The lyrics in Sue Standing's False Horizon quietly celebrate the lust that is living, the lust that is memory. "The risks we're taking aren't really risks/ Orange trees. Umbrella Pines. Wisteria." These poems, some of which are set in the far reaches of Africa and India, argue for the primacy of the present tense, a present tense that shines erotically out from under the beautiful drapery of a manifold rich and cultural world history. Therefor...
Literal as well as metaphorical monsters inhabit this book of 38 innovative fictions. Here the reader will encounter not only zombies and ghosts, but a lyrical dream braided into a brutal and sorrowful real world. Monsters¿ vision embodies the heartbreakingly private and depressingly public¿and the funny flipside of it all.
Impeccably crafted and structured, these poems of chaos are contained in neat and beautiful packages. Christopher Davis is a poet through the through, wedded to lyric compression and given to expansive emotional sweeps.
Coming of age in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge, these poems explore what it is to be an Irish American Catholic, a dutiful son of hard drinking, sometimes hilarious and sometimes tragic parents, a son of Brooklyn, and, too, deeply rooted to the country of his ancestors, Ireland. Dark, funny, and sometimes troubling, these poems, always accessible, track a life well lived and felt.
Rift, the third collection from poet and psychologist Forrest Hamer, engages hauntingly with separations and reconciliations that are both personal and socio-historical. Hamer draws on his American experience--including his youth in Goldsboro, North Carolina--and his African heritage--including the tragic conflicts between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda--to investigate memories, stories, and the way in which a poem is a "hopeful body." Yusef Kumun...
Another time, another day, another continent perhaps and life would be better, lovers happier, the dead un-dead" is the sought-after "geographic cure" in the title of Vermont poet Ellen Dudley's powerful second book. Traveling through North America, into South America, and to the islands of the Philippines, these visceral poems present landscapes and habitats with verve and perception. Equally vivid are the people and animals who occupy these ...
Hams Beneath the Firmament, Terri Ford's second books of poems, is a portrait-at-a-gallop, a series of drive-by rhymes, a lively foray into the "jello of elsewhere." It is a book with sex, with budgies, with kissing the dead, and with Mid western livelihoods, with "counting asymptomatic / years." A more rambunctious collection of poems does not exist, its "inkity blue" skies and "the way the wild-eyed speak // of the rapture" spectacularly its...
The Little Book of Guesses takes place in a 21st-century world where we've "accustomed ourselves to our customized dogs" and "honed the idea of ideas there in the obstacle race / that'll never catch up." But while it's a world we're not unfamiliar with--"in the New Age tourism is the answer"--Gallaher's turn of speech is at once unique and exact, making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Serving as our escort through scenes includi...
The Washington Post Book World" has written that, "C. Dale Young straddles the realm of science and the world of emotion." Employing the careful emotion of Constantine Cavafy and the realism lying beneath Oscar Wilde's comic epigrams, he has crafted a contemplative book of poems both wise and willing to learn. Drawing on traditional forms including the villanelle and pantoum, and writing with an ear for a beautiful, resounding rhythm, C. Dale ...
