Category: Reviews & Criticism
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“it all simply modulates incomprehensibly”: On Richard Hell’s Poetry Collection What Just Happened by Peter Valente
When he was in his early twenties and living in lower Manhattan in 1974, Richard Hell founded the band Television with Tom Verlaine, a friend from high school. He eventually split up with Verlaine and created the Heartbreakers, along with Johnny Thunders, the well-known guitarist who had played with the New York Dolls. Later, he…
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Poetry Review: G.H. Mosson Reads Mag Gabbert’s Sex Depression Animals
As part of the arc of autobiographical American poetry, Mag Gabbert’s academic-press debut is a chiseled, yet tender self-portrait across lyric poems that skate around finalities and resonate through intersecting images, vignettes, and emotions. In this way, Gabbert’s heartfelt, jagged, and impressive poetry marks a departure from confessionalism’s origins in landed insight: Plath’s epiphanies, Lowell’s…
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“Like a knight of stone who smiles”: On Robert Desnos’ Poetry Collection Night of Loveless Nights by Peter Valente
I first became aware of Robert Desnos’ poetry, as well as many of the works of the surrealists, in The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry edited by Paul Auster. The poem that was central to me in that volume was “No, Love Is Not Dead,” translated by Bill Zavatsky, with that memorable…
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Poetry Review: Sarah Sarai Reads Harsh Realm by Daniel Nester
A poetic navigation through the Nineties, Daniel Nester’s Harsh Realm is a palooza of a collection, nimble of word and beautifully designed. Its poems reveal the moving parts of someone who, it would seem, doesn’t cease movement of geography or vision. While many of the poems are reflective, romantic, revelatory, you know, poemy, the opener, “My…
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Fiction Review: Ben Lewellyn-Taylor Reads Emma Cline’s Novel The Guest
Alex, the young woman at the center of Emma Cline’s second novel, The Guest, spends a day at the beach among the wealthy residents on the East End of Long Island, appearing like she belongs. She’s staying with Simon, a man in his fifties, who has invited Alex to his house—with its high ceilings and…
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“A Front-row Seat at the Horror Show”: Ann Leamon Reviews Lyudmyla Khersonska’s Poetry Collection Today Is a Different War
One night you go to bed in your ordinary life, only to awaken transformed. Such a transformation occurred in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Lyudmyla Khershonska’s wrenching, beautiful book of poems, Today Is a Different War, captures the sensation of being a citizen of a developed country on the doorstep of Europe only to…
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Poetry Review: Josh Nicolaisen Reads Fighting Is Like a Wife by Eloisa Amezcua
In her second full-length collection, Fighting Is Like a Wife, Eloisa Amezcua delivers a shockingly palpable recounting of the tragic relationship between boxer “Schoolboy” Bobby Chacon and his first wife, Valorie Ginn. The book shares its title with a 1983 Sports Illustrated article, which first highlights Chacon’s rise to fame and its effects on their…
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Poetry Review: Zachary Kinsella Reads Caryl Pagel’s Free Clean Fill Dirt
Resonating with metaphysical awareness, humor, and clarity, Caryl Pagel’s Free Clean Fill Dirt is gracefully unglamorous in its foreboding, tactile verse that seeks to enumerate the material and moral decline of our planet. Pagel roots her eco-poetics in what she names “Ordinary Strata,” which service ekphrastic responses to familiar places that are in some form…
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“Paying Attention: A Review of Lilith Walks by Susan M. Schultz” by Karin Falcone Krieger
The premise is simple: a series of short vignettes about interesting encounters while out on walks with the dog. The dog is Lilith and she is the driving force of these small fables written by her human, Susan M. Schultz. Lilith Walks is a three-year journey through a suburban neighborhood on O’ahu, Hawaii through the…
Heavy Feather Review 