Heather Swan’s A Kinship with Ash, Reviewed by Erica Goss
Heather Swan A Kinship with Ash Terrapin Books Reviewer: Erica Goss “A hot wind … // ushers in the end / of the holocene.” These lines from the poem “Heat I” bring us face-to-face with the raw truth at the heart of Heather Swan’s A Kinship with Ash. In a voice detached and devastatingly precise, […]
Judith Skillman’s The Truth about Our American Births, Reviewed by Erica Goss
Judith Skillman The Truth about Our American Births Shanti Arts Reviewer: Erica Goss The poems in Judith Skillman’s enigmatic new collection, The Truth About Our American Births, provide clues to the shifting stories of the author’s family’s past. Bits and pieces of that elusive truth appear in various forms throughout the book: a grandmother’s eccentricities, […]
Ace Boggess’s Misadventure, Reviewed by Erica Goss
Ace Boggess Misadventure Cyberwit Reviewer: Erica Goss In Misadventure, Ace Boggess writes about prison, old horror movies, and the absurdities of modern life. These poems create a powerful and moving narrative, following one man’s all-too-human failings as he navigates a baffling and often darkly humorous world. In language full of deft turns and surprises, Boggess […]
Michael Kriesel’s Zen Amen, Reviewed by Erica Goss
Michael Kriesel Zen Amen Pebblebrook Press Reviewer: Erica Goss Told in a book-length series of abecedarians, Michael Kriesel’s Zen Amen is a dizzying romp through one man’s investigation of the occult. The abecedarian, a 26-line poetic form that begins with the first (or last) letter of the alphabet and is followed by the next (or […]
Lynne Thompson’s Fretwork, Reviewed by Erica Goss
Lynne Thompson Fretwork Marsh Hawk Press Reviewer: Erica Goss What makes a family – biology, desire, accident or choice? In Lynne Thompson’s Fretwork, family is all of these and more. An adoptee, the author examines adoption’s fraught emotional territory with an unsentimental eye, taking the reader through the web of abandonment, coincidence, and mystery surrounding […]
