Tag: Jordan Sanderson
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STRANGER, by Adam Clay
The speaker of “Our Eternal Sounds,” a poem in the second section of Stranger, observes, “We don’t know why we speak // but yet our voices / persist.” These persistent voices serve as intermediaries between the mind and the world throughout this expansive, yet intimate collection. “Stranger” describes the world and the speaker. Throughout the…
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BRAIN CAMP, by Charles Harper Webb
“[H]eadlights lance the air,” Charles Harper Webb writes in “Questionable,” a poem about teenagers parking in the “night-woods.” This stunning image might serve as a metaphor for what Webb does in all of the poems in Brain Camp. Concerned primarily with the passage of time, the collection contains both deeply personal poems and critiques of…
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Missing the Moon, by Bin Ramke
There are many moons, the physical moon and the imaginary moon, the moon on which people have walked and the moon on which people have wished, the moon that affects tides and the moon reflected on a lake. Most of the time, we are not aware of the abstract laws that govern our every moment,…
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The Plume Anthology of Poetry 2013, edited by Daniel Lawless, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson
When I was a child, I would spend hours gazing into my View-Master, clicking through image after image and then clicking through them again. Each image seemed to transport me to this other world, where the landscapes and characters were distinct but unified by a certain slant of light. I wanted to stay in that…
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Instructions for the Orgy, a poetry chapbook by Jeffrey Hecker, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson
Jeffrey Hecker’s Instructions for the Orgy begins with the preparation of “the loving space.” “Delouse” it, the speaker tells the “first to the orgy.” This is the first of many directives to the roughly ten people (one guy gets locked in a woodshed and there’s a “line of braided Wiccan women,” whose accompaniment of Reed…
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Rain of the Future, by Valerie Mejer
The poems in Valerie Mejer’s Rain of the Future are mesmerizing and irresistible, and the translations are first-rate. Mejer delivers a world that is at once familiar and strange, and even before arriving at the series of poems titled “Uncanny,” Freud’s concept of the same name comes to mind. The poems are intimate and immediate,…
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Only Jesus Could Icefish in Summer, by Abraham Smith
The poems in Only Jesus Could Icefish in Summer surface and ripple the tongue before diving into the depths of the primal mind, where words lose their schools, abandon their beds, and hybridize with anything that swims. Anyone who has lived in rural America will recognize the syntax of conventional wisdom, but these poems are…
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The Pedestrians, by Rachel Zucker
I came of age during the heyday of the compact disc, and one of the highlights of that era was the release of a “double album.” 2Pac’s All Eyez on Me comes to mind. Fans debated whether the discs should be heard separately as stand-alone albums or as a single album. No matter the answer…
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On the Street of Divine Love, new and selected poems by Barbara Hamby, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson
Barbara Hamby’s On the Street of Divine Love is magnificent. Containing fifteen new poems and a distillation of her previous four collections, it should secure her place among the best American poets. Hamby is the master of the contemporary ode, many of which are included here, and the collection as a whole is an ode…
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Kimonos in the Closet, by David Shumate
Organized in thematic clusters, the poems in David Shumate’s Kimonos in the Closet are poems of exchange—cultural, historical, mythological, and personal. Shumate has long occupied a prominent place in the world of prose poetry, but his prose poems ring differently from those of other practitioners of the form. They do not often systematically derange the…
Heavy Feather Review 