Joshua McKinney's debut collection of poetry, "Saunter," shows immense devotion to and passion for language in all its aspects. He intensely attends to words and delights in the play of accidental connections and complications. Such amusement and playfulness with oppositions is evidenced in lines like: "an opening / a cello scales / some stairs. Risen, / a thought falls." McKinney's awareness of the complex resonance of literary history and current issues of language comes through in his dedication to making the appearance of language, not just its sound or its relative meaning, an integral...
Joshua McKinney's debut collection of poetry, "Saunter," shows immense devotion to and passion for language in all its aspects. He intensely attends t...
"By Reason of Breakings," Andrew Zawacki's first book of poetry, overwhelms and silences by virtue of its extremely austere beauty. In highly wrought lyrics, prose poems, fragments of apocrypha, and splintered efforts at song, this volume is forceful and haunted by doubt. Each intimate and restrained line is a glimpse at a wisdom that defies paraphrase, each image carefully chosen and constructed. Zawacki's language summons and invites and is almost menacing in its delicate intensity: "Weight is the syntax of filling empty spaces: scalpels and expired tissue fall, but fire rises to fever and...
"By Reason of Breakings," Andrew Zawacki's first book of poetry, overwhelms and silences by virtue of its extremely austere beauty. In highly wrought ...
Imagine moving at the speed of thought through a sense-engulfing place--a city street, carnival, airport lobby . . . or your life. You have no time to process these sounds, sights, smells, and other psycho-sensory bulges--but no way either to keep them from flooding the inner world you're forever on the verge of sorting out. That, in part, is the experience of reading these sixty-nine sonnets, each of them a multidimensional, kaleidoscopic crossroad where organic form, awareness, memory/history, intellect, and the human heart merge into specificity, like light at the end of a...
Imagine moving at the speed of thought through a sense-engulfing place--a city street, carnival, airport lobby . . . or your life. You have no time...
The "Blaze of the Poui" unfolds a world as lush and rank as a rain forest, as alluring and lethal as a sea anemone. Mark McMorris writes of the Americas, the Caribbean, and other sites of conquest and colonization, mingling the personal and political, the present and past on pages filled with the language of parting, remembering, promise, and loss.
The "Blaze of the Poui" unfolds a world as lush and rank as a rain forest, as alluring and lethal as a sea anemone. Mark McMorris writes of the Americ...
"Lord Brain" is an extended meditation on the psyche (in its double sense of mind and soul) in its relationship to that three-pound bundle in our skull. Bruce Beasley s collection of thirty-one poems is named for Sir Walter Russell Brain, or Lord Brain (1895-1966), the eminent British neuroscientist and author of "Brain s Diseases of the Nervous System." Bringing into conversation the disparate fields of neuroscience, theology, linguistics, particle physics, and theology, these poems investigate in both lyrical and scientific terms the relationship of brain to mind and soul, and of brain...
"Lord Brain" is an extended meditation on the psyche (in its double sense of mind and soul) in its relationship to that three-pound bundle in our s...
What desire doesn t seem as of the distance across a sea? asks the voice in Kerri Webster s debut collection of poetry, even as the poems attempt the transformation of that liminal space wherein word meets sense, loneliness meets solitude, and surface meets interior. Here, the surface is our signature, and the image of stain presents a way for that surface to reflect that which it conceals. In this space, human intimacy encounters the transience and frailty of language, and through these encounters we discover that grace lies in believing always in imprint. "
What desire doesn t seem as of the distance across a sea? asks the voice in Kerri Webster s debut collection of poetry, even as the poems attempt the ...
The poems in "Passenger" shift between the mythology of the Middle East and the bombed-out cities of the former Yugoslavia, the ancient Roman tale of Romulus and Remus, the choreography of murder, and the hawking of grisly war memorabilia on destroyed city streets. Influenced by Susan Maxwell s experiences as a relief worker in a Croatian refugee camp at the height of the Bosnian War in the 1990s, these poems document a nameless, mythological war that has collapsed the boundaries between contemporary and ancient history and between personal memory and folklore. The poems tender voices wake to...
The poems in "Passenger" shift between the mythology of the Middle East and the bombed-out cities of the former Yugoslavia, the ancient Roman tale of ...
What follows occurs in a moment; a flash. It would detail a single tangibility if that did not entail all sensation. Stacy Doris charts the invisible, investigates the unborn, and describes everything not yet imagined. The tightly constructed verses of "Knot" weave imagery of decay and birth, science and culture: the warp and weft of cloth, digestion, wave particles, and a talking cat. Linguistic play abounds, and Doris presents us with a human double bind: to cling to the stability of the tangle or to participate in the circuits of entanglement.
From "Under Fire, i.VII" "Each moment,...
What follows occurs in a moment; a flash. It would detail a single tangibility if that did not entail all sensation. Stacy Doris charts the invisib...