On Place | by Sharon Fagan McDermott & When I Say Here | by M.C. Benner Dixon
Sharon Fagan McDermott is a poet, musician, and a teacher of literature at a private school in Pittsburgh, PA. Her most recent collection of poetry, Life Without Furniture, published by Jacar Press (2018) wrestles with finding and feeling at home in the world and seeking sanctuary in an often challenging life. As National Book Award winning poet Terrance Hayes says about this new collection: “Sharon Fagan McDermott inhabits the spaces between the common and the uncommon…The whole world, visible and invisible, inhabits this wonderful new book.” Additionally, Fagan McDermott has published three chapbook collections, Voluptuous, Alley Scatting (Parallel Press, 2005), and Bitter Acoustic, which won the 2011 Jacar Press Chapbook competition.
M.C. Benner Dixon lives, writes, and grows things in Pittsburgh, PA. Working in both prose and poetry, her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review Online, Sampsonia Way, SLICE Magazine, Appalachian Review, Vastarien, HeartWood Literary Magazine, pacificREVIEW, Paperbark Literary Magazine, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and elsewhere.
There Is No Good Time for Bad News by Aruni Kashyap
Reviewed by Maggie Rue Hess | August 31, 2021Future Cycle Press, April 2021Paperback, 58 pages, $15.95 Reminding us that to turn your eyes away from suffering is to turn away from compassion, Aruni Kashyap wrote his unflinching collection of poems There is No Good Time for Bad News about the largely undocumented insurgency within Assam. […]
Dramatic Situation: On Listening for Story in Poetry | by A. Loudermilk
A. Loudermilk’s Strange Valentine won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. His poems can be found in publications like Cream City Review, Gargoyle, Smaritsh Pace, Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, and Tin House, and his essays in The Writer’s Chronicle, PopMatters, Midwest Quarterly, and the Journal of International Women’s Studies. He’s taught creative writing at Hampshire College and Maryland Institute College of Arts.
Hamlet Figura by Daniel Gabriel
Reviewed by Michael Sutherlin | April 22, 2021Dos Madres Press, 2020Paperback, 196 pages, $20.00 If you are looking for a cerebral investigation into the nature of language, Daniel Gabriel’s Hamlet Figura is for you. It is a single work divided into a series of 175 individual poems, each written in free verse and organized into […]
Dissent by Descent—Diving into the Madness and Rejecting Genre Boundaries | by Cassidy McCants
Cassidy McCants is a writer and editor from Tulsa, Oklahoma. She received her M.F.A. in fiction writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She edits for Nimrod Journal and is creator/editor of Apple in the Dark. Her prose has appeared in The Lascaux Review, Liars’ League NYC, Gravel, The Idle Class, filling Station, Witch Craft Magazine, and other publications. She won the 2020 Innovative Short Fiction Contest from The Conium Review, and her stories have received honorable mentions from Glimmer Train Press. She is a 2020 Artist INC fellow.
Magnolia Canopy Otherworld by Erin Carlyle
Reviewed by Rachel Bryan | April 13, 2021Driftwood Press, December 2020Paperback, 82 pages, $14.99 Erin Carlyle’s debut poetry collection Magnolia Canopy Otherworld opens with an epigraph out of Dorothy Allison’s 1992 novel Bastard Out of Carolina: “Family is family, but even love can’t keep people from eating at each other.” Like Bone Boatwright, Carlyle’s collection […]
The Nonfiction of Skin | by Alizabeth Worley
Alizabeth Worley lives in Utah with her husband, Michael, and their two sons, just north of BYU where she received an MFA. She was a 2016 poetry winner of the AWP Intro Journals award and her essays, poems, and illustrated works have appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, Hobart, Sweet: A Literary Confection, and elsewhere. You can find more of her work at alizabethworley.com.
What Is Poetry For? | by James McKee
James McKee enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Gotham. His debut poetry collection, The Stargazers, was published in the spring of 2020, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, New World Writing, The Ocotillo Review, Illuminations, CutBank, The Raintown Review, Flyway, Saranac Review, THINK, The Midwest Quarterly, Xavier Review, and elsewhere. He spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.
My Name Is Romero by David A. Romero
Reviewed by Maggie Rue Hess | March 23, 2021Flowersong Press, 2020Paperback, 109 pages, $20 There are many occasions that prompt us to introduce ourselves: over the phone, in an email, at a business meeting, for a friendly get-together, on our first day at a new job. The typical introduction requires that we share our names […]
“That they are there”: On George Oppen and the Role of Poetry | by Jonathan Farmer
Jonathan Farmer is the author of That Peculiar Affirmative: On the Social Life of Poems and the poetry editor and editor in chief of At Length. He teaches middle and high school English, and he lives in Durham, NC.