reviews

by Rae Armantrout
Wesleyan University Press 2013
Reviewed by John Deming

“a metaphor / for sensation” 

When Roger Ebert died three weeks ago, I felt compelled to go back and read some of his old reviews of some of my favorite movies. In his review of Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, Ebert has an insight about the Allen character, Mickey: “his constant complaint is that it’s all very well for these people to engage in their lives and plans and adulteries, because they do not share his problem, which is that he sees through everything, and what he sees on the other side of everything is certain death and disappointment.”

Part of the appeal of Rae Armantrout’s poetry is the extent to which the poet, while not fixated solely…

by Sung Po-jen (translation by Red Pine)
Copper Canyon Press 2012
Reviewed by Diana Arterian

“read the poem of old Tung-p’o”

In his original 1995 preface to Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom, Red Pine (aka Bill Porter) describes his personal history with the text. Red Pine found a 1928 edition of Sung Po-jen’s book in a used bookstore in Hangchou, China in 1989; he writes, “I had never heard of Sung Po-jen or his book, but I was captivated by the pictures.” The history of the text itself, extrapolated in Lo Ch’ing’s introduction, involves several centuries of disappearance after its original publication in 1261, with moments of resurfacing every few centuries or so before copies were made from an original edition…

by Jonathan Wells
Four Way Books 2011
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

“I cannot catch tomorrow’s train tonight.”

In Train Dance, Jonathan Wells tells clear-headed and powerful stories. There are definite ideas and feelings he wants conveyed and, boldly, he speaks them to the reader. Wells has gone out of his way to avoid artifice and obfuscation. The clarity is almost disconcerting, but as the poems progress through their four distinct sections, the reader stands on the base Wells has built. The late poems earn a higher attainment, not only by being strong poems, but by ensuring the reader is prepared to feel them thoroughly in a single read. Where he begins by taking in a whole city, his poems grow more intimate by degrees. The later …

by Sandra Simonds
Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2012
Reviewed by Jay Deshpande

“So this is why I am what I do, twisting the new mouth” 

The characters in Sandra Simonds’s poems frequently struggle with a forced anonymity: instead of having names, they go by a title or function, like “Wife,” “Dog,” “Pediatrician,” “Mother.” At the same time that these identities are constrained, however, the poems speak with forceful, often violent personality, splashing across the page, doubling over on themselves, prizing histrionics and sudden changes of register above the controlled order of a consistent voice. Study of a poem by Wislawa Szymborska can come just lines after “his wife’s band / drugged…

by Joyelle McSweeney
Fence Books 2012
Reviewed by Mark Gurarie

“Spit and ash/Makes a black ink”

There is no denying that this last year was marked by senseless violence; by racism and misogyny in our politics; by continued wars and the all too tangible evidence of global warming. The buzz words we in 2013 are left with are bleak, sobering: “the 47%,” “Superstorm Sandy,” “The Fiscal Cliff” and “The War on Women,” and optimism about the future is melting away like the arctic ice caps. It is in encountering the apparent hopelessness, violence and senselessness of our times and our way of living— as well as our own scrolled through and constantly re-uploading hyper-awareness of it all— that McSweeney’s Percussion…

by Amy Pence
Ninebark Press 2012
Reviewed by Christine Swint

“glide past the earth’s/ fierce and mythic wreckage”

Armor, Amour, from Ninebark Press, is a beautiful collection of lyric poetry by Amy Pence. With the advent of e-books, the printed book as tangible artifact has evolved even further into an art form, and Ninebark Press has produced a lovely, intimate example of this. The cover design by Seth Fitts depicts an angel or a woman with bowls and spheres orbiting her shadowed face. This image evokes a few of the key poems in the collection, such as “Global Positioning Systems.” The bowls and spheres refer to satellites that are lost in a void, our human space debris. The reader is both implicated and observed as one of…

by CJ Evans
New Issues Poetry & Prose 2012
Reviewed by Cate Peebles

“There is rest out here, ready to have you”

CJ Evans’s debut collection, A Penance, is a dance of veils, vivid with threads, figures, and musical fringes. Its language is dexterous and muscled, charged always by a need for sanctuary and peace. The opening poem, “Penitential,” is a prayer for protection, as suggested by the invocation of St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers:

The Saint Christopher’s medal worn

in prison, and landmines and stamens and blood on the eyeglasses
photographed on cobbles. The hollow of her inner thigh, the shadows

of her eyelashes. The dead. Everywhere here. Tattooed teardrops
or cherry blossoms. Needles. Pray for us.

…

by Robert Ostrom
YesYes Books 2012
Reviewed by Chris Emslie

“All these / joys have alabis”

Robert Ostrom’s The Youngest Butcher in Illinois is sharp and beguiling. The poet’s language is musical and decorative, providing a fitting score for the cinematic ambition of his images. He opens at his most demonstrative; the first poem reads like a tour of a new home—or perhaps a survey of the book’s first section, “Bone Map”—with the speaker helpfully telling us, “Here is the sweetgum in dirt. Here are the bones / rearticulated.” This is a confident welcome, slightly derailed by the throwaway closer, “And you can’t breathe.” From here on out, the ‘showing’ that characterizes the…

by Patricia Lockwood
Octopus Books 2012
Reviewed by Francesco Grisanzio

“When the world was ending, liquidators came.”

Patricia Lockwood reclaims the word “cartoonish” from the pejorative with her first book, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. The poet embraces the essence of cartoons to develop the logic behind lively, surreal, imaginative, and humorous poems, insisting on curious intellectual rigor and formal dignity throughout. Her poems are populated by Popeye, by “a worm wearing glasses.” Lockwood uses these characters as tranquilizers, and as the basis for complicated discussions on symbolism, perspective, invention, and language, among other topics. The highlight here, though, isn’t that Lockwood…

by Anselm Berrigan
Wave Books 2011
Reviewed by Nick Sturm

“the hope / that we may remain / deeply unknowable / to one another…”

Anselm Berrigan’s book-length poem Notes From Irrelevance is a 65-page stanza with lines between two and seven words in length, the result of which is a continual column of language. Berrigan’s short lines, often built of long, tangential sentences, are crafted to be as colloquial as they are rigorous. Continually enjambed, these sentences are intricate machines of grammatical, intellectual, and emotional force. For instance, Notes From Irrelevance begins with a sentence 18 lines long. The subject and verb of that sentence, “I came,” do not appear until line 18:

Armed with

…