Tag: Tupelo Press
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Poetry Review: Jesi Bender Reads Ae Hee Lee’s Collection Asterism
A gift of a dozen blue eggs. My father cracks one over the pan and provokes its yolk with a fork. Come and see—it doesn’t tear. I mutter a prayer: may my life be as tenacious. Asterism is the 2024 Dorset Prize winner, which is given to a full-length poetry manuscript each year by Tupelo Press. The…
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“Now That the Sky Is a Mall”: Karin Falcone Krieger Reviews Rewild, a poetry collection by Meredith Stricker
“Ecopoetics trades an Emersonian or Thoreauvian attention to sublime, untouched nature for sites of extraction, chemical spills, and other manifestations of ecosystemic violence.” –Jean Thomas Tremblay In 1990 Jack Collom published his long documentary ecopoem entitled “Passages” about the passenger pigeon, once so numerous “they blotted out the sun,” and their extinction at the hands…
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“I Drive, Therefore I Am”: Michael Quinn Reviews Today in the Taxi by Sean Singer
Born in Mexico in 1974, former New York City taxi driver Sean Singer recalls his time behind the wheel in his wryly humorous third poetry collection Today in the Taxi. Almost all of these prose poems begin “Today in the taxi” and follow the same structure: from the observational (who he’s driving) to the existential…
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Bed, a poetry collection by Elizabeth Metzger, reviewed by Ben Tripp
The fundamental operation of Elizabeth Metzger’s new short poetry collection Bed is a careful reduction: the mortar of her true life experience shines as a thing somewhat negated or at any rate sublimated and newly preserved as a partial element in this ripe synthesis, which seems to also subversively toy with the idea of poetic…
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“Stubborn Laughter”: Robert Dunsdon Reviews The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez by Iliana Rocha
Some poor fellow jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. “Mid-air,” says Iliana Rocha, “his bones split & feathered—he was lightness. His bones were braided wheat. Bones collapsed like a birdhouse of Popsicle sticks. He said his hands transmuted into doves, in a constant state of ascent like an apology.” These irresistible lines are but a…
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“The Field of What Is Unsaid”: A Review of Lisa Hiton’s Afterfeast by Hannah Riffell
Longing is universal, and heartbreak is as common as the cold, as any scanning of the literary canon will reveal. What the poet Lisa Hiton recognizes, however, is that the landscapes on which these universal longings unfold are wonderfully impressionistic, to the point of being somewhat unknowable to anyone besides one’s self. In Afterfeast, Hiton’s…
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“Polarities of Love”: A Review of The Pact, poems by Jennifer Militello, by Aline Soules
Love. How does it manifest itself? How many kinds are there? What are its extremes? With The Pact, Jennifer Militello explores love through imagery, language, and leaps. She never blinks and investigates the subject from its outer edges to its core. The book is framed by two poems: “Agape Feast” and “Ode to Love.” In…
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“Whispering Dominium”: Witness and Want in Corey Van Landingham’s Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens
Lately, I have been searching for acknowledgment. I have been studying the genesis of Western universalisms, identifying the need to push back against the disembodied voice of knowledge decided upon by Western European and North American countries, by men who declared their own godlike authority, and their way of seeing and doing, as representative of…
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Glass Bikini, a new poetry collection by Kristin Bock, reviewed by Michael Kleiza
To enter Kristin Bock’s world is to fall off a precipice, get sucked into a black hole of the weird, and then come out the other side even weirder. She transforms a world you know into one so surreal, it flies past you only to reverse and collide with the back of your head, implanting…
Heavy Feather Review 