A. E. Stallings on Ernest Hilbert’s Last One Out | Review
Elizabeth Knapp’s Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak | Review
An at-times crushing, always beautiful chronicle of sorrow and its afterlife, Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak will haunt you long after you’ve turned its final page.
Tom Pickard’s FIENDS FELL | Review
Like Dante's La Vita Nuova and Basho's Back Roads to Far Towns -- key works Pickard references -- Fiends Fell journal is a prosimetrum that moves between prose and verse.
QUAD by Alistair Noon | Friday Pick
Despite my characterizing of Quad as elliptical, there is a clear distinction between narrative disjunction (abundant) and the formal repletion and bevelled finish of Noon’s quatrains (also abundant).
Stephanie Burt’s Advice from the Lights | Friday Pick
Burt’s riddles are a clever solution to the problem of how to communicate specific personal experience in a way that maintains a modicum of the universal, a problem she has explored in her criticism.
Refresh Your Imagination: Evan Rail’s The Brewery in the Bohemian Forest | Friday Pick
Failing any opportunities for Kout-drinking in the UK, let me paraphrase the advertising slogan for a beer Evan Rail would never drink: with its intoxicating slow ferment of beer and history, The Brewery in the Bohemian Forest refreshes parts of the imagination that other writing just can’t reach.
Friday Pick: “If I Don’t Breathe How Do I Sleep” by Joe Wenderoth
A meta review of Joe Wenderoth's latest collection, in which the reviewer, Keith Driver, ends up reviewing his own annotation of Wenderoth's book.
Friday Pick: Ed Skoog’s “Rough Day”
"There’s an urgent need in these poems to keep moving forward, to not get bogged down in the past. And breaking from the past is part of what Skoog is after in form as well." - Katie Herman reviews Ed Skoog's second collection, Rough Day
Friday Pick: Jan Heller Levi’s “Orphan”
At first glance, Orphan is made up wildly disparate parts—part personal narrative, part allegory, part song — but together they describe a journey.
Friday Pick: Sarah Lang’s “For Tamara”
What makes Sarah Lang's book-length poem, For Tamara, especially compelling isn’t the conceit of its apocalyptic vision, but its implications. Lang asks the question most of us fail to ask when we imagine survival in a post-apocalyptic word: How much do we really know?