Review by Ruth Hoberman Wendy Drexler’s latest collection of poems, Notes from the Column of Memory, addresses the bewilderment and wonder involved in aging. Inspired by Donna Conklin King’s sculpture of the same name, the title poem opens, “See…
Browsing: Book Reviews
Review by Laura Dennis The soundtrack is sometimes James Taylor, sometimes Nirvana. The flavors are Hot Fries and Moon Pies, consumed by middle school girls dressed in thrift-store grunge. Smells of pine and drying tobacco mingle with teenage sweat…
Review by Olivia Kate Cerrone The title poem of Jennifer Martelli’s brilliant new chapbook, All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes invokes Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, where supernatural transformations involve women ensnared in patriarchal violence. In the aforementioned piece,…
Review by Jennifer Martelli In the Sophocles tragedy, the character of Antigone (daughter of blinded and exiled Oedipus) was the victim of state-sponsored violence. Entombed alive after defying King Creon’s order not to bury her brother, Eteocles, she became…
Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger In Amy Barone’s latest collection of poetry, Defying Extinction, she delves into the environment, the natural world, family, grief, and growth. She affords each topic considerable care. Divided into five sections, the volume shows…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor In this eighth collection by Alison Stone, the poet moves through the history of recent years, including the pandemic, protests, racial and economic inequities and their historical context. These are poems that do not…
A History More Complete – Suzanne Frischkorn’s Fixed Star (JackLeg Press 2022) Reviewed by Sunni Brown Wilkinson How do we understand the self? Such work is both an uncovering and an inventing, a mixture of history and imagination,…
Review by Ana C.H. Silva Much to the credit of Jessica E. Johnson’s full-length poetry book, Metabolics, published by Acre Books, I couldn’t read it at all until I managed to still my frenetic end-of-year energy. Caught in the…
Review by Jamie Wendt In her new collection of poems, Crow Funeral, Kate Hanson Foster writes about the beauty and stresses of motherhood. The book begins with the title poem “Crow Funeral,” which sets a melancholy tone for the…
Review by Ellen Miller-Mack In Leaving Paradise, Gail Thomas writes about the natural world, climate change, her dog, her partner, seasons, dementia, Bethlehem Steel and being a mother, daughter and grandmother. She engages her subjects with extraordinary attention, precision,…