Tag: Tupelo Press
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Walking Backwards, a poetry collection by Lee Sharkey, reviewed by Toti O’Brien
On the cover of Lee Sharkey’s Walking Backwards, an anonymous oil painting—“Pogroms”, circa 1915. A long line of people crosses from left to right—their clothes the same color of the background, as if the landscape had already started absorbing them, soon to entirely obliterate them. Two of the men look vacuously forward—not far, as their…
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“This, being absorbed”: Alicia Wright on Gale Marie Thompson’s New Poetry Collection Soldier On
“I only wanted for to see / the spectral light,” writes Gale Marie Thompson in her first collection of glistening poetry, Soldier On. Yet it is not as much the idea of light that governs this collection, more the gesture of “hand[ing] each other daffodils in the dark,” that speaks to the sort of intimate…
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Poetry Review: Michael Schmeltzer on The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by Maggie Smith
The Japanese fairy tales I remember from childhood involve infertility. Often there was a kind old woman and an equally kind old man, both bowed in prayer, both wishing for a child. Miraculously, a child would appear—in a giant peach floating down the river, in a shoot of bamboo. After I moved to the United…
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Joshua Kleinberg Review: Long Division, poetry by Alan Michael Parker
The title of Alan Michael Parker’s most recent collection, Long Division, reveals a dialogic tension that the twenty-first century poet can’t help but consider—if not in his poems, then certainly in his heart. Parker’s recurring discussion of simple mathematical concepts, in poems such as “The Biologist from Pennsylvania” and “Family Math,” takes on the surprisingly…
Heavy Feather Review 