16 Ergebnisse.

Because A Month of Someday doesn't waste a word, I'm tempted to quote lavishly from these wry, economical, limpidly attentive urban observations recorded during the most frightening month early in the pandemic. But I won't. Every poem here merits quoting-and rereading. Gerald Wagoner's eye misses nothing, his quiet voice is a chorus of one that reaches beyond self to his city. This is a book that remembers, and also a book to remember. Read it...

The seriousness of a debilitating illness-not only living with, but moving on despite the odds are the darker fare of these new poems by Dennis Rhodes. Poems of liberation, of one who has come out the other side alive. One could imagine Sexton, if she had survived her own life, writing poems like "The last OCD poem":A knife in the sinkmakes me stop and think:What if I tried it again?I wouldn't surviveor come out alive-I think I'll just wield m...

Le's furious and steeled voice leaves nothing unturned, propelling these poems through explorations on displacement, womanhood, the body and its endured violences, by confronting a history as tenuous and elusive as the ghosts it conjures. She has created her own version of the Ark, one where the whale, forgotten in the original, is now carried as 'a child of immigrants, like me.' In these tender, earnest yet fierce poems, Le does not reinvent ...

Joseph O. Legaspi writes, "How do languages speak to each other? Through poetry, of course, and Translucence illuminates such a correspondence, an exchange, a dance. Callihan and Abdel Jaber's parallel scripts and lyrics shine beautifully side by side, over and under, voicing loss, longing, and love.

We take our pleasure as we can, " Karen Hildebrand writes in the title poem to Crossing Pleasure Avenue, in a voice filled with desire tempered by loss. And there is much pleasure in this book of terse lyrics that engages the reader with humor, brio, and bite, in poems about everything from the 60s TV show Leave It to Beaver with a crossdressing Beev, to imagining a year without men, to envisioning widows hijacking the C train. In these wildly...

In Safe Danger, here comes a Stephen Zerance poem sashaying down the street: snakeskin tights, clean-shaven legs, black tee-why it could be Satan himself. It's a far cry from the baggy khakis and extra large shirt Zerance's father would have him wear, clothes sure to make him feel like a real man. No dice. Instead, Zerance has demons under his bed and phobias-mosquitos, bees, roaches, spiders, ticks-a veritable house of horrors, his pain and l...

Antoinette Brim's These Women You Gave Me brings front and center Biblical mythology and legend to prove a truth that can only be proven through poetry. Brim's poems sing of the ability women have always had to love and thrive in spite of the most oppressive odds, or as Brim herself would say, "His heavy breath filled her ears. She awakened beneath." This is really gorgeous work. -Jericho Brown In These Women You Gave Me, Antoinette Brim weave...

This Someone I Call Stranger, by James Diaz, is absolutely transcendent. Diaz's evocative and courageous writing conjures up cinematic imagery with heartbreaking vulnerability and unpretentious strength. Reading his poetry, I could feel myself leaning in, yearning alongside him for such things as the affirmation of love, beauty, and release in the face of brokenness, loss, and pain. Diaz's poems will make you feel deeply. His poems will make y...

These poems grapple with how romantic relationships, both gay and straight, are defined-and what we gain or lose from these definitions. The poems reflect on the experience not only of the poet, but also of wives throughout history, particularly as represented in classic literary texts, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Joan Didion.Fitzpatrick's "The Genius of Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With, " for example, is inspired by a paragraph in Gertrude Stei...

Reading Was Body provided a jolt I didn't realize I needed. Using tropes of iteration and erasure, medical mythologies, nude portraiture, phantasmagoria, and "theme and variation" on phrases ranging from "cellar door" to "lighter fluid, " Billie R. Tadros bewitches us with language's associative properties. Fun House Mirror Sonnets? Here. The emotional semantics of Hollandaise sauce? Here. These are poems of loss and reckoning, yet these nimbl...

When can you tell a book of poems is really working? For me, it's when the poems provide revolutions on themes-like the tiniest clink of a kaleidoscope. Look at how Adam Zhou recognizes what stays with us, how "the landscape will remain sullen / still dressed in a sullen light" and yet the people are always leaving and returning, wounded or memory or truly breathing, even in stillness. Zhou's lyrics are a personal history unfolding before us. ...

Luminous, whimsical, and heartbreakingly tender by turns, the poems in Lisa Andrews's Dear Liz are a portrait of a beloved friend, movie-going companion, and fellow human, a portrait unfailingly loyal to the telling detail, unfailingly appreciative of the quotidian. To read these poems is to enter a world that is full of feeling, at once loving and quirky. There is grief here, but these poems, more, help us continue in the world, which Andrews...

Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer from rural Washington State. His writing has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review, Gawker, Salon, The Rumpus, and The Feminist Wire, where he is an Associate Editor. He's currently a post-doctoral fellow in systems biology at New York University. Osmundson describes Capsid: A Love Song as an essay "On HIV, desire, science, queerness, love." The book is a long-f...

Sarah Sarai's Geographies of Soul and Taffeta takes place in a universe where the real and the unreal meet each other in a careful, ecstatic dance, where words melt into their partners and opposites, and Yin and Yang swirl together like the best kind of soft serve ice cream. The ideas and images here are exact, surprising, and often humorous: in fact, Sarai's poems strike new ground in being intelligent and far reaching while maintaining an ai...

In one of the most important of the Aztec festivals, a month of fasting was ended by observers of the fast cutting up the figurine of a god made of amaranth seeds and honey and sharing it in small pieces. In Amaranth, Robert Carr feeds his readers portions of a god fashioned out of terror, longing, infidelity, wasting sickness, humor, and a searing lyrical tenderness. Crafted with the fingers of a careful and nimble musicianship, these poems v...

Love is always complicated. In the poems of Drug and Disease Free, Michael Broder ponders the further complexities of love in the context of HIV and AIDS. These include the pleasures of cruising and anonymous sex, the challenges of marriage and erotic power exchange, and the realities of blood, cum and other "proud, shameful mysteries." Broder's narrator is intimate and plainspoken even when formalist, wary but romantic, self-mocking and elegi...