Gregory Djanikian's So I Will Till the Ground, his fifth collection of poetry, confronts the horrors of the Armenian genocide of 1915, and the diaspora that ensued, sending survivors to all parts of the world. By turns sorrowful and redemptive, the poems go on to record the author's boyhood in Egypt, and his eventual emigration to the United States and into a wholly different dulture, and a life, however new, lived always under the haunting shadow of the 1915 cataclysm. -These are poems,- Peter Balakian has written, that -chart . . . nothing less than a modern epic trajectory- whose...
Gregory Djanikian's So I Will Till the Ground, his fifth collection of poetry, confronts the horrors of the Armenian genocide of 1915, and the diaspor...
Cummins's quiet, lunatic meditations--wait, that should be luminous meditations--are great fun. From father-son stuff, and women grousing about that sentimentality, to killing someone in your basement, or turning into a locust, or imagining his wife's violent death, Cummins hasn't lost his touch. Though he does lose his hand in one of these. Maybe it should be numinous meditations? In various emergencies?
Cummins's quiet, lunatic meditations--wait, that should be luminous meditations--are great fun. From father-son stuff, and women grousing about that s...
In Comet Scar, James Harms blends closely observed scenes from domestic life with meditations on music, film, politics, and society, intent on dissolving the membrane that separates the realms of culture and the quotidian.
In Comet Scar, James Harms blends closely observed scenes from domestic life with meditations on music, film, politics, and society, intent on dissolv...
The poems in Civil Twilight animate the present with a resonant sense of the past as character and as compass. The poems in the collection reveal a fascination with the possibilities that exist at every moment and the human urge to resist the inevitable and keep those possibilities open. The language of these poems is personal and precise, attuned to the mind and the ear, and, with each line, readers are reminded of the perilous nature of our existence here on earth and of the joys our lives hold.
The poems in Civil Twilight animate the present with a resonant sense of the past as character and as compass. The poems in the collection reveal a fa...