Review of Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles by Diane Raptosh

Reviewed by Melissa Kwasny Etruscan Press, 2020. Paperback, 116 pages. $17.00. Conceive: to plan or devise a plan in the mind, or, in biological terms, to become pregnant, as with a child. But what does it mean to be conceived, and a larger question, to be conceived 200,000 years ago as a separate species—with an astonishingly […]

Review of The River Where You Forgot My Name by Corrie Williamson

Southern Illinois University Press/Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, Paperback, 80 pages. $15.95. By Melissa Kwasny “A poem can be said to have two subjects,” Richard Hugo states in his collection of essays on writing, The Triggering Town, “the initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or ‘causes’ the poem to be written, and the […]

Review of Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today by Melissa Kwasny

University of Washington Press, hardback, 96 pages, $19.95 Reviewed by Tami Haaland Inspired by Christopher Howell’s ecstatic poem “Another Letter to the Soul,” Melissa Kwasny’s Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today is a careful examination of the self, the natural world, the spirit and soul woven through with an awareness of language and […]

Review of What Does Not Return by Tami Haaland

Lost Horse Press, Paperback, 78 pages. $18.00. Reviewed by Melissa Kwasny Poetry has been described as the art of speaking the unspeakable. In some cases, the unspeakable is that which seems almost too horrific to put into words. Sometimes it is that the state of being is too nuanced, the feeling too fleeting, the insight […]

Poetry Advocacy

How do we get the vital news not only from poems, as William Carlos Williams famously wrote in his poem “Asphodel,” but also of them? Many poets are skillful at promoting their work and connecting with a larger audience, but the sheer number of books published each year makes it nearly impossible to know about […]

Review of The Lord of Everywhere by John Hodgen

Lynx House Press, Paperback, 62 pages. $19.95 By Cameron Scott Scaffolded around Romans 8:38-39, Hodgen’s Lord of Everywhere launches its reader into a constellation of sounds, ideas, things, and images. These are poems built from word seeds, from thoughts which launch back and forth between music and association, association and music, until they find their way toward […]

Review of Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems by Ted Kooser

Copper Canyon Press, 2018 by James Crews   Reading Ted Kooser’s work, I often think of what Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman wrote in his book, Sabbath as Resistance: “Worship that does not lead to neighborly compassion cannot be faithful worship.” This same sense of “neighborliness” has been apparent in the poetry of Kooser, who […]

A Forest of Names (October) by Ian Boyden

[Throughout 2018, we have committed to publishing a selection of poems from each month of Ian Boyden’s manuscript “A Forest of Names.” Over the course of a year, Boyden translated the 5,196 names of schoolchildren crushed in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. He then began a collection of poems, each written on the day of each […]

“I Keep My Eye on the Rose”: A Review of Second Bloom by Anya Krugovoy Silver.

Cascadia Books, 2017 by James Crews Anya Krugovoy Silver passed away at the age of 49 about a year after her fourth collection of poetry, Second Bloom, was published. She had been diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer fourteen years ago, while pregnant with her son, Noah. In a 2010 interview with Macon Magazine, Silver said […]

Review of Telling My Father by James Crews

Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2017 $15 (paper) Reviewed by Grunge [James Crews is a contributing editor to this magazine–Editor] The sober, plain-spoken, gently ironic, and good-humored voice in James Crews’s second full-length collection, Telling My Father, confirms the promise evident in the poet’s first collection, The Book of What Stays. These new poems demonstrate […]