Patricia Smith – Oral Exam

Oral Exam He soft-circles his cave of mouth, pop prickle of beard there, threads you in, plays underside raw with tubed tongue, sucks febrile current from your slitted eye. A violence brusquely swaps toes and hairline, sapped muscle slant- rhymes my weather. Nervy knot, potentate of keen collapse, all and every is linked to your […]

Katerina Canyon’s Surviving Home, Reviewed by Jessica Drake-Thomas

Katerina Canyon Surviving Home Kelsay Books Reviewer: Jessica Drake-Thomas Katerina Canyon’s Surviving Home, explores familial relationships within black families, in particular the speaker’s toxic relationship with her father. “My father is a shark / with a hope chest / clenched between his teeth,” she writes in the title poem, “It holds my heart and brain […]

Barbara Hamby’s Holoholo, Reviewed by Lee Rossi

Barbara Hamby Holoholo University of Pittsburgh Press Reviewer: Lee Rossi How to describe a book as filled with delights as Barbara Hamby’s Holoholo. Ostensibly a book of odes, these are not just poems of praise; she urges her readers to construe the term “ode” in the widest possible sense: as a “poetic stance, a poetic […]

Karen Llagas – Gratitude Journal

Gratitude Journal I flinch a little as I reach for it, this practice we do each night in bed, our pillow talk these days, when sending ourselves off to sleep needs less effort than late night sex. Does this flinch expose how little regard I have for joy? Is this why I clasp our one- […]

Diane Frank’s While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems, Reviewed by Brian Fanelli

Diane Frank While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems Glass Lyre Press Reviewed by Brian Fanelli After the last few years of political tumult and after the year that was 2020, Diane Frank’s While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems truly feels like a much-need respite, a booster shot […]