Farnaz Fatemi’s Sister Tongue, Reviewed by Vivian Wagner
Farnaz Fatemi Sister Tongue Kent State University Press Reviewer: Vivian Wagner Farnaz Fatemi’s Sister Tongue explores the experience of living between the cultures of Iran and the United States, and of trying to find a voice to describe that in-betweenness. The poems take root in various liminal spaces, tracking the poet’s journey through cross-cultural identity […]
Carolyn Oliver’s Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble, Reviewed by Vivian Wagner
Carolyn Oliver Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble The University of Utah Press Reviewer: Vivian Wagner The title of Carolyn Oliver’s Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble is a kind of riddle that gives a road map for the collection itself. This is a collection about traumatic storms, and […]
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, […]
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 […]
John Sibley Williams’ The Drowning House, Reviewed by Vivian Wagner
John Sibley Williams The Drowning House Elixir Press Reviewer: Vivian Wagner John Sibley Williams’ new collection of poetry, The Drowning House, is a book about personal, cultural, and generational trauma. It explores American violence, racism, and colonialism, telling multiple stories from a variety of perspectives about the intersecting traumas inflicted by this country’s people, as […]
