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 […]

Christopher Bursk’s With Aeneas in a Time of Plague, Reviewed by Vivian Wagner

Christopher Bursk With Aeneas in a Time of Plague Ragged Sky Press Reviewer: Vivian Wagner With Aeneas in a Time of Plague, Christopher Bursk’s last collection, is a book about loss and death, hope and renewal. It is, in many ways, a pandemic book, published in the midst of Covid and always on some level […]

Bill Yake’s Waymaking by Moonlight: New and Selected Poems
, Reviewed by Vivian Wagner

Bill Yake Waymaking by Moonlight: New and Selected Poems Empty Bowl Reviewer: Vivian Wagner Bill Yake’s Waymaking by Moonlight is a collection of poems exploring the interrelatedness of people, culture, and wilderness. Ultimately, the poems describe a continuum between humans and the natural world, suggesting that they cannot be extricated from each other. Divided into […]

Julie E. Bloemeke’s Slide to Unlock, Reviewed by Vivian Wagner

Julie E. Bloemeke Slide to Unlock Sibling Rivalry Press Reviewer: Vivian Wagner Julie E. Bloemeke’s Slide to Unlock is a collection focused on the powers of technology to connect people and to create distance between them. From phones to cameras to writing itself, the technologies referenced in these poems promise an elusive union, even as […]