Silk Poems
Silk Poems, in its small, delicate package, is monumental in scope, in its place as one part of Jen Bervin’s larger research project and also in its wide-ranging suggestiveness. The material book itself has a shiny gray cover, garment-like and silken to the touch, imprinted…
Archeophonics
The poems in Peter Gizzi’s most recent book, Archeophonics, operate as an homage to sounds as in the title poem that celebrates echoes, repetitions, and other poems, “the archive in the mouth”: I’m saying this and it’s saying me That’s how it works, seesaw like…
The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Garolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All
There is a familiar generosity in the title, in the sentences, the tones and range and heart of it all. One expects such from C.D. Wright’s every move, and here it is again in her posthumous book of essays focused largely on a brief (usually…
Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt
Like the astronomer, Dr. Steven Vogt, who, from the spectrometer on the Keck Observatory in Hawaii searches for extrasolar planets, in Matvei Yankelevich’s latest collection the poet becomes a seeker—the occupation of both proving on-going, probing, inconclusive, revelatory. Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt also suggests…
Lazy Suzie
Lazy Suzie is an ecstatic, often surreal exploration of the eye’s ability to turn about, to travel out the window, into a painting, through the telescope, over the hills, through the images of a magic lantern or camera obsura, and off mirrors. Not only the…
Model City
The experience of reading Donna Stonecipher’s Model City is to be incrementally encompassed by a world built from repeated structures and phrases, a world that fosters our own growing attentiveness as the poet responds to the urban world. The phrase that opens the book and…
The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson and Loom by Sarah Gridley
Poetic responses to the world include, of course, responses to other art forms, ekphrastic poetry in response to a painting or sculpture, and responses to works of literature—poems, novels, or essays. Poets have often taken up dialogue with significant writers from the past, as ways…
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