reviews

by Nate Pritts
H_NGM_N BKS 2013
Reviewed by Lucy Biederman

“…the leading man in a Romantic poem”

Nate Pritts has said that he is interested in poetry as opposed to individual poems. One can locate this focus in the attention and emphasis Pritts places on creating and forming a speaker/self across the space of a book. In his sixth book, Right Now More Than Ever (H_NGM_N BKS 2013), Pritts not only allows but cultivates a sense of the tossed-off, the experiment, even the mistaken—there are tries within these poems that other poets might have edited out or not have thought to include in a poem in the first place.

Much of this book is spent considering the imperative to poetry and engaging with and against the traditional or expected…

by Daisy Fried
University of Pittsburgh Press 2013
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

“whacking the ground, like a wife / pounding her pillow, alone all night.”

Daisy Fried’s new book, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, begins with a long poem titled “Torment.” The title suggests distress and provocation, and the poem delivers. Its first stanza is a tight fourteen lines and introduces one of several college seniors at the cusp of the “real” world. Panicked, presumably about his future, the student declares, “ ‘I fucked up bad.’” These are the poem’s opening words. The student, named Justin, is returning from a job interview in the financial district of Manhattan. The poem’s speaker, who turns out to be a professor…

by Lisa Russ Spaar
Persea Books 2012
Reviewed by Peter Longofono 

“regnant with a strange, godlike power”

Reading Lisa Russ Spaar, one can’t swing a stick without hitting Hopkins or Keats. Her chiseled diction and nimble command of vocabulary ennoble her subjects in ways reminiscent of both; she is equal parts sensual and cerebral. Furiously compact, classically restrained, her poems arrive at weighty moral fulcrums after astonishing flights of virtuosity. It’s all earned, and formally packed with such adroitness that her numinous, soul-destroying gestures gust backwards through the lines preceding them. Here is the complete text of the poem “Midas Passional”:

No one has touched me for

…

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.

…