I Am Finished With History
“The hallowed argument goes: The artist has vanished but the art lives. Franklin adds: Art lives and so does the materials that made the art. They mark us as much as we’ve manipulated them.” -Esther Lin
All posts filed under: Book Reviews
Longform reviews of poetry books.
So You Are Here, and There Still
“Throughout Metzger’s poems, we experience an artist patching together experiences– present and past–, sometimes creating tectonic friction between them, in order to dwell on the meaning of life.” -David Roderick
Part Animal Born of Lake: On Anne Haven McDonnell’s Breath on a Coal
An “other”-oriented text, Breath on a Coal, with its promiscuous curiosities, its investments in recovering our own animality, articulates the disorders of our human subjectivities.
Dreamlike Transformation: On Gabriella R. Tallmadge’s Sweet Beast
“. . . the speaker reckons with how to love and live in a marriage that is dissolving.”
An Empire Elsewhere
Ceballos captures the violent reality oppressed and exploited people face due to U.S. involvement in their home country’s economy and politics that force them to eventually leave. Through elegies, we’re made aware of the horrors they face after fleeing to the U.S.
Each Time You Enter You’ll Carry a Mouthful of Names
“Whereas Bilotserkivets speaks of the immediacy of survival,–what do I and You have to do in order to get beyond this current or recently passed stage of destruction and horror–Shuvalova picks up with the implicit question of how are you acting to remember that this is not something that just passes for everybody, that in order to read about these horrors they must be experienced by real, living countries.” -Cody Stetzel
Damaged and Open: On Sara Moore Wagner’s Hillbilly Madonna
“Struggle against the patriarchy is coupled with a critique of the faith that has made itself an organic part of Wagner’s Appalachia—as much a part of the region as its animals, trees, and plants.” -John McCarthy
Remember The Day I Discovered
“In her collection, Ben-Oni humanizes the study of physics, from stars to particles: how can we fit into a world we cannot see, does it matter if our reality is not as real as we once thought, and do our deep feelings of loss, joy, and grief mean anything when placed against infinite space?” Mark Spero on Rosebud Ben-Oni
A Guide to Disorientation: Dana Levin’s Now Do You Know Where You Are
. . . the collection is concerned with all kinds of disorientation–literal, figurative, physical, and spiritual–and the despair that comes with navigating unknown terrains.
A Poet of the American Storm: On Landscape with Bloodfeud by Wendy Barnes
“To be vulnerable means also to know one’s own capacity for harm . . .”–Amy Klein