Christopher Shipman – Fog of Tongues
Fog of Tongues Once upon a time words were beasts. They stalked the things they named until they became those things. Fog stumbled behind. We lived and died in the direction of words— a religion of everything unsaid. Not an image named. Only sun and shadow— that violent blur between moon waxing gibbous moon waning crescent. […]
Chanel Brenner’s Smile or else, Reviewed by Ann Wehrman
Chanel Brenner Smile or else Press 53 Reviewer: Ann Wehrman Chanel Brenner’s collection, Smile or else, which won the 2021 Press 53 Award for Poetry, includes the poem, “Facebook Post: Mother Son Hike at Solstice Canyon: 183 Likes.” Composed in alternating lines of regular then italicized font, the poem contrasts the author’s rhapsodic perceptions during […]
Leonard Gontarek’s The Long Way Home, Reviewed by Vivian Wagner
Leonard Gontarek The Long Way Home BlazeVOX [books] Reviewer: Vivian Wagner Leonard Gontarek’s The Long Way Home is, in fact, a long poetry collection—over 400 pages!—with a sweeping, sublime style to match its length. Perhaps that length is necessary to do what the collection seems to want and need to do: make sense of […]
Alexis Jackson’s My Sisters’ Country, Reviewed by Brian Fanelli
Alexis V. Jackson My Sisters’ Country Kore Press Reviewer: Brian Fanelli Alexis V. Jackson’s collection, My Sisters’ Country, is a book with impressive historical scope—integrating numerous influences and references, and underscoring everyone from Gwendolyn Brooks to June Jordan to the four Black Girls, Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, who […]
Bruce Bond’s patmos, Reviewed by David E. Poston
Bruce Bond patmos University of Massachusetts Press Reviewer: David E. Poston Section III of patmos, Bruce Bond’s new book-length poetic sequence, begins: I was just another creature crawling from the mausoleum, and I thought, so this is it, the place in the final chapter where I’m judged for my cruelties, blunders, failures of attention, and […]
