Editor Recommends: Umansky, Mountain & Miller
Review by Jeremy Michael Reed // August 14, 2019The Barbarous Century by Leah UmanskyEyewear Publishing, March 2018 // 106 pages, £10.99High Ground Coward by Alicia MountainUniversity of Iowa Press, April 2018 // 112 pages, $19.95Ceremonial by Carly Joy MillerOrison Books, May 2018 // 104 pages, $16.00 As 2019 began, I found myself looking to books from last year […]
Nineteen Letters by Kathleen McGookey
Reviewed by Natalie Tomlin // August 6, 2019Batcat Press, April 2019Hardcover, 45 pages, $24.00 With the publication of her latest chapbook, Nineteen Letters, Kathleen McGookey continues her playful and inventive interest in mortality, especially as it relates to the experience of parenting. This collection of epistolary prose poems addressed to death is an expansion on several poems […]
Voice, Body, Form, Line: Brenna Womer’s Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance
Review by Shane Stricker // December 27, 2018 C&R Press$10.00, pp. 54 Brenna Womer’s Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2017) unfurls like a person aging, unfolding, unraveling, becoming itself. It is essay and poetry and lyricism in word and line and form choice. It is voice. One voice for the one who forgets what she was searching for only the night previous. “It’s true, […]
Girl, Deconstructed: Erin Hoover’s Barnburner
Review by Stephanie Walls // October 9, 2018Elixir Press, 2018$17.00 Erin Hoover fearlessly explores and reports on the experiences of a young Millennial woman entering adulthood in her debut full-length collection of poems. The overall structure of the book is a three-part narrative that steadily grows in intensity from smolder to burn and finally culminates […]
The Wolf at the Door: Darren Demaree’s Two Towns Over
Review by Donna Vorreyer // July 31, 2018 Trio House Press, 2018Paperback, 84 pp, $16 Meet the wolf. Seductive. Dangerous. In Darren Demaree’s Two Towns Over, drugs are the wolves that infiltrate and prowl the author’s home state of Ohio, turning the kingdom of his childhood into a fairy tale in reverse, haunted by lost dreams […]
A Conversation of Selves: Canese Jarboe’s dark acre
Review by Emily Corwin // July 13, 2018Willow Springs BooksACME Poetry Series, 2018 Neosporin Pussy Queen, Rodeo Queen, Rapunzel, figurine, showgirl, apex predator, a midnight bride with a 40-foot train: Canese Jarboe’s speaker is all of these and more, riveting us in their debut chapbook, dark acre (Willow Springs, 2018). I have been entranced, awe-struck with Canese ever since I met them (digitally) in 2016, and was floored […]
The Cracks are How the Light Gets In: Amy Strauss Friedman’s The Eggshell Skull Rule
Review by Donna Vorreyer // June 22, 2018Kelsay Books, 2018Paperback, 78pp. $14.00 “For every//passageway leads to potential/and to poison. We drink//what we can, reaching and grateful.” This line is from the titular poem of Amy Strauss Friedman’s collection The Eggshell Skull Rule. The poem’s epigraph explains the meaning of the “eggshell skull rule.” It states that […]
Searching the Roots of Female Existence : Melissa Queen’s Girls Named for Flowers
Review by Jocelyn Heath // June 13, 2018dancing girl press, 2017Paperback, 32 pp. $7 We may never meet young women named Zephyranthes, Ipomoea, and Caladium in real life, but we do in Melissa Queen’s Girls Named for Flowers. In her debut chapbook, Queen grapples with sweeping questions of femininity and identity. Where the title seems to beckon us toward pretty things, Queen shifts our […]
Editor Recommends: An Everyday Practice of Starting Over in Stephanie McCarley Dugger’s Either Way, You’re Done
Review by Jeremy Michael Reed // February 23, 2018Sundress Publications, October 2017Paperback, 88 pp. $12.99 Former Grist poetry editor Stephanie McCarley Dugger’s first full-length collection of poems Either Way, You’re Done speaks from a rural environment of crops, tractors, catfish, and hawks. Dugger’s book moves through such archetypal images from her narrator’s past in order to make sense of […]
“Henry Puts the Casual Back in Casualty”: Conor Bracken’s Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour
Review by Allison Pitinii Davis // December 4, 2017Bull City Press, 2017ISBN: 978-1-4951-5768-448 pp. / $12.00 In Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), winner of the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger takes the speaker on a surreal tour of international atrocities. The collection’s absurdism deglorifies and satirizes Kissinger and his neo-imperialist policies. By posing as Kissinger’s lover, the speaker inhabits a self-incriminating position. This suggests that Kissinger represents both himself but also the […]