Tag Archives: Spring 2013

THEOPHOBIA

Bruce Beasley BOA Editions ($16) by Spencer Dew Able to breed only inside the feline digestive tract,Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite, that works its way deep up a rat’s brain and lays its cysts all through the amygdala, unsnips the dendrites from networks or instinctive fear that repel the rat from cat pheromones, and reconnects the […]

PLUME

Kathleen Flenniken University of Washington Press ($24.95) by John Bradley How do you encompass a danger that’s not perceptible to our senses, and, harder still, how do you write a gripping poem about it? Kathleen Flenniken bravely attempts to do just this in her poem “Radiation!”: Invisible, tasteless, and odorless but sounds on certain tongues […]

STEAM LAUNDRY

Nicole Stellon O’Donnell Boreal Books ($19.95) by Julie Swarstad Johnson In his essay collection Strange Good Fortune, poet David Wojahn describes the “preponderance of first books and MFA theses which devote their opening section to poems about childhood and family history, moving in later sections to . . . ‘poems vaguely about sex’ and ‘poems about […]

PUBLIC FIGURES

Jena Osman Wesleyan University Press ($22.95) by Rachel Trousdale In Public Figures, her fourth book, Jena Osman gives herself an assignment: “Photograph the figurative statues that populate your city. Then bring the camera to their eyes (find a way) and shoot their points of view. What does such a figure see?” Osman, armed with a disposable […]

ROUGH, AND SAVAGE

Sun Yung Shin Coffee House Press ($16) by Laila Rode Simon The fiery depths of the Hell created by Dante Alighieri in 1861 contain eight circular, descending layers, intensifying as he travels deeper down with his guide, Virgil. In her new collection Rough, and Savage, Sun Yung Shin draws from Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno, the […]

GONE & GONE

Rodney Wittwer Red Hen Press ($17.95) by Ralph Pennel Gone & Gone, Rodney Wittwer’s debut poetry collection, bears the grace of a poet writing at mid-career. It reminds us all at once that it is impossible to imagine a life free of difficulty, of contradiction, of complication; that our lives would be much less rich […]

In Praise of Sentences

by Louis Phillips “A sentence is a sound in itself in which other sounds called words may be strung.” —Robert Frost There is no reason to believe that this opening sentence will end with the word euphoric. It could, of course, end with any word in any language of the world. Ah, the magic, mystery, […]

THE POETRY OF ATHENA KILDEGAARD

Rare Momentum Red Dragonfly Press ($15) Bodies of Light Red Dragonfly Press ($15) Cloves & Honey Nodin Press ($16) by James Naiden First collections of poetry can be exciting: brand new talents, fresh voices, limitless potential. Sometimes a second collection has the power to confirm that talent, though sometimes it can expose a fluke. But […]

THE NEW MIDWESTERN

a review of Broken Gates Ken McCullough Red Dragonfly Press ($15) Confluence of Mysterious Origins William Waltz Factory Hollow Press ($7) by William Stobb Having grown up as a poet on regional Midwestern anthologies like Common Ground, Beyond Borders, and Prairie Volcano, I was introduced early on to the conventions of deep image poetics. And as a native […]

Flipping into Wit:
An Interview with David Shields

Interviewed by Eric Lorberer In 2010, David Shields whipped critics and scholars into a frenzy over his manifesto, Reality Hunger (Alfred A. Knopf). An examination of the role of authenticity in art, literature, and popular culture, the book earned Shields both fans and enemies. In support of his new book, How Literature Saved My Life (Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95), […]