Pamela Wax’s Walking the Labyrinth, Reviewed by Merryn Rutledge
Pamela Wax Walking the Labyrinth Main Street Rag Publishing Reviewer: Merryn Rutledge In her elegiac Walking the Labyrinth, author Pamela Wax makes her way through a maze of grief after a brother’s suicide. Wax’s poems reflect a sense of responsibility to find meaning in the mysteries of life and death and to honor lost loved […]
Robert Fillman’s House Bird, Reviewed by Brian Fanelli
Robert Fillman Bird House Terrapin Books Reviewer: Brian Fanelli Robert Fillman has a knack for turning the everyday domestic space into a fascinating subject for his poetry. He drills into home life, mining memory and personal experience. The result is a fine debut collection, House Bird. Even if the spaces Fillman writes about feel familiar, […]
Vivian Faith Prescott’s Old Woman with Berries in Her Lap, Reviewed by Vivian Wagner
Vivian Faith Prescott Old Woman with Berries in Her Lap University of Alaska Press Reviewer: Vivian Wagner Vivian Faith Prescott’s Old Woman with Berries in Her Lap is a collection of poems about colonialism, survival, and the reclaiming of lost cultural identity. These poems explore the Sámi diaspora and one descendant’s desire to discover, re-narrate, […]
Gloria Gervitz’s Migrations: Poem, 1976-2020, Reviewed by Maria Rouphail
Gloria Gervitz Migrations: Poem, 1976-2020 Translated by Mark Schafer New York Review Books Reviewer: Maria Rouphail Truth be told, until Mark Schafer’s translation of Migrations (Migraciones) I had never read anything by the late Mexican poet, Gloria Gervitz (1943-2021). Fault the chasms in my education (I have a doctorate in the literature of the United […]
Charles Rammelkamp’s The Field of Happiness, Reviewed by David E. Poston
Charles Rammelkamp The Field of Happiness Kelsay Books Reviewer: David E. Poston Charles Rammelkamp’s new collection, The Field of Happiness, brought to mind Ted Kooser. In a 1992 essay in Can Poetry Matter?, Dana Gioia characterizes Kooser as striking “the difficult balance between profundity and accessibility” and goes to great lengths to defend Kooser as […]
