Category: Reviews & Criticism

“What We Were Given”: Darren C. Demaree on Count Four., a University of Tampa Press poetry collection by Keith Kopka

I grew up in a house with a shortage of oxygen. One person would take deep and disquieting breaths while the rest of us relied on the air tucked underneath our clenched jaws to make it from room to room. It’s been a long time since I experienced that level of intensity from familial reckonings,…
Hiding in a Thimble, a HVTN Press debut poetry collection by Roseanna Alice Boswell, reviewed by Erin Carlyle

Roseanna Alice Boswell’s debut collection of poetry, Hiding in a Thimble, imagines power in the most tender of places: Bunny needs you to get hipto her hop, her sexual symbolstatus—fertility goddessfur princess swoon. She is cotton-tailed and pheromoned. With a sharp, rose-colored knife, her poems artfully tear apart the meaning of the word saccharine. What is…
Selling the Farm, a C&R Press lyric memoir by Debra Di Blasi, reviewed by Aimee Parkison

Selling the Farm, winner of C&R Press Nonfiction Award, defies traditional notions of genre. This lyrical memoir is a biography of a family farm veiling the autobiography of a writer using craft to locate her family in a place lost to time. The author is hidden in the landscape of her childhood. In the setting…
Peter Valente on Larry Fagin’s Peaches & Gravy: Selected Poems 1966-2016, edited by Miles Champion (Cuneiform)

In free improvisation, one requires quick responses to shifting musical realities. Instinctive unity of mind, hand, mouth is required: out with the ego. You need to be quick, “on the fly,” then it’s gone. It’s about aiming for the Total Sound, heard in part. When it works: success of the ultimate dares. In this way,…
Island of the Innocent, Diane Glancy’s Turtle Point Press poetry-hybrid consideration of the Book of Job, reviewed by Dan Alter

Diane Glancy’s new collection of poems and hybrid writing Island of the Innocent is a grand work of what my tradition calls midrash (elaborating on, weaving new stories into, the canonical texts) on the Book of Job. An acclaimed writer of Cherokee descent, Glancy brings the ancient text, via a Christian, King James English, into…
“Notes on a Procedural Cityscape”: Joshua Rothes’ We Later Cities, an Inside the Castle Castlefreak novel, reviewed by Mike Corrao

Joshua Rothes becomes the second victim of Inside the Castle’s Castle Freak Remote Residency for Generative Digital Composition—which requires the afflicted writer to create a 100,000 word manuscript in five days using bots/Twine-builds/neural networks/etc. Whatever means necessary. The first book to come out of this was Mike Kleine’s Lonely Men Club, which utilized the probability…
Fablesque, a Tupelo Press poetry-hybrid collection by Anna Maria Hong, reviewed by David Epstein

Let’s assume the superlatives are sprinkled all throughout. Fablesque is a poetically expansive volume, a house in three wings, with each wing containing, if not multitudes, then dozens of rooms. The rooms themselves are in every architecture, from personal archeology—where Anna Maria Hong offers her family history in thin threads of heredity: impetuous ancestry plus…
Saturday Morning Chapbook: Ryan Bollenbach Monches Mai Ivjfäll’s Sick Sonnets (Radioactive Cloud)

My immediate connection to Mai Ivjfäll’s Sick Sonnets was through the band Ceremony. In their first single (“Sick”) from their 2010 album Ronhert Park, the singer litanizes on things he is sick of, many of the complaints directed at hardcore itself. At the time of Ronhert Park’s release, the band were hardcore darlings, and the…
“Inside Endless Epidemics in America” – Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic, a Tupelo Press anthology edited by Kristina Marie Darling & Jeffrey Levine, reviewed by Amy Strauss Friedman

As of this writing, over 420,000 Americans have died from Coronavirus, to say nothing of the suffering of millions of others. “They died breathing the country that failed them. They died without the hands that should have held them at the last breath. They died in nobody’s arms,” Rachel Eliza Griffiths tells us, a truth…

Category: Reviews & Criticism

“What We Were Given”: Darren C. Demaree on Count Four., a University of Tampa Press poetry collection by Keith Kopka

Hiding in a Thimble, a HVTN Press debut poetry collection by Roseanna Alice Boswell, reviewed by Erin Carlyle

Selling the Farm, a C&R Press lyric memoir by Debra Di Blasi, reviewed by Aimee Parkison

Peter Valente on Larry Fagin’s Peaches & Gravy: Selected Poems 1966-2016, edited by Miles Champion (Cuneiform)

Island of the Innocent, Diane Glancy’s Turtle Point Press poetry-hybrid consideration of the Book of Job, reviewed by Dan Alter

“Notes on a Procedural Cityscape”: Joshua Rothes’ We Later Cities, an Inside the Castle Castlefreak novel, reviewed by Mike Corrao

Fablesque, a Tupelo Press poetry-hybrid collection by Anna Maria Hong, reviewed by David Epstein

Saturday Morning Chapbook: Ryan Bollenbach Monches Mai Ivjfäll’s Sick Sonnets (Radioactive Cloud)

“Inside Endless Epidemics in America” – Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic, a Tupelo Press anthology edited by Kristina Marie Darling & Jeffrey Levine, reviewed by Amy Strauss Friedman