reviews

by Noelle Kocot
Wave Books 2011
Reviewed by Nick Sturm

“There is no other life.”

The basic reason I pick up a book of poems, or attend a live show, or walk along a river, is to get closer to something I don’t understand, or at least to feel like I’m getting closer to it. Most of the time I’m just sitting in it, eating macaroni and cheese in it, feeling hurt or happy in it, sleeping in it, reading poems in it. Noelle Kocot’s The Bigger World has it, and each time I read these poems I feel fixed. I am a human being surrounded by things I don’t understand, and loving it, and falling apart in it, and suddenly this mysterious pronoun that once referred to everything I don’t understand now refers to the poems in The Bigger World.

As the…

by Natalie Lyalin
Coconut Books 2009
Reviewed by Christine Kanownik

Behind every poem in Natalie Lyalin’s Pink & Hot Habitat, there is a questioning suggestive of a latent trauma that is simultaneously brilliant and painful. “A) Geography,” a poem written as a test you might receive during a nightmare in which you realize you aren’t wearing any pants and your teacher is a giant alligator in glasses, exposes Lyalin’s preoccupation with the horrors of adolescence. There are no questions on the test, merely absurd options, A) and B) repeated maddeningly.  A few poems are almost entirely composed of rhetorical questions. “Whatever happened at prom?” and “Why don’t you birth something?”…

by Matt Hart / by Nate Pritts
H_ngm_n Bks 2010 / BlazeVOX Books 2010
Reviewed by Patrick Dunagan

“two hummingbirds singing”

Conjecture, simple statement and sense perception yield sparkling poetics in the latest collections by poets / editors / publishers / pals Matt Hart and Nate Pritts. Each author is extremely active in poetry world business affairs: Hart edits and publishes the journal Forklift, Ohio and press Forklift Ink, and Pritts is behind H_ngm_n and H_ngm_n BKS. The energy they bring to poetry is tremendous and truly generative in the best sense – when you come across a project that either or both has a hand in, you’re fired up with mad desire to respond. Their latest books are no exception.

In their own ways…

by Elizabeth Bradfield
Persea Books 2010
Reviewed by Natalie Storey

“I want ice to be my mending”

In Approaching Ice, Elizabeth Bradfield conjures a stunning polar world and invites readers to contemplate familiar narratives of exploration, physical hardship and climate change. Bradfield, a naturalist and the author of the previous collection Interpretive Work, populates her new book of ice-themed poems with famous explorers and animals who struggle to survive in the world’s harshest regions.

The eccentric characters who dare traverse the polar landscape emerge in a series of narrative poems, titled after the names of the explorers. Throughout the collection, Bradfield intersperses lively prose poems…

by Kenneth Irby
North Atlantic Books 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

“the back / calm pasture of the mind”

In 2009, North Atlantic Books published a handsome book finally gathering the work of Kenneth Irby, one of Charles Olson’s lesser known disciples, who has labored in small press obscurity since the early ‘60’s. Irby fans (including myself) have been waiting for a comprehensive collection since Station Hill Press put out Call Steps in 1991. My first reaction was too much like the blurbs on the back, making me feel like, as Stephen King put it in the self-effacing preface to his book on writing, “a literary gasbag or a transcendental asshole.” But any review of Irby should emphasize that this work is not necessarily…

by Allen Ginsberg
Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2007
Reviewed by Mike Corkery

“Spirit shrunken in a bounded / Immortality.”

As long as there is something for people to fear—communists, terrorists, death—and as long as there is such a thing as a status quo, Allen Ginsberg’s poetry will be essential. Words can seem powerless in a cluttered socio-political landscape where truth is a matter of opinion. But Ginsberg’s approach to the political and spiritual potency that poetry can embody is challenging, messy, and wide open. In fact, there’s no better way to describe Ginsberg’s work than with his own words: “The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s…

by Traci Brimhall
Southern Illinois University Press 2010
Reviewed by C.J. Opperthauser

“it sings for no reason”

Traci Brimhall’s strong debut collection, Rookery, is littered with images of birds. A gorgeous line about a bird or birds or something having to do with birds–a dead chickadee found on a porch, an owl frightened by a person’s nightmare–inevitably finds its way into the fabric of almost every poem. These recurring bird images, though sometimes fleeting and often quite minor, suggest both a connection with nature and a realistic view regarding the flighty, temporary aspects of emotion and love. The birds, then, imply a larger devotion: finding the eternal in the fleeting.

This means…

by Matthew Rohrer
Wave Books 2011
Reviewed by Nate Pritts

“and then they do / and I don’t know”

Poetry that rejects the delicacies & eloquences of the human spirit as it interacts with our human world crushes in all around us.  Some of these poems work by way of a distorting & discomforting syntax, presenting readers with speakers who barrel their way from one strobe-like & startling & empty pronouncement to the next without notating any kind of ideological or emotional sphere or allowing any linguistic system for discursive, narrative or associative logic to take hold.  Still others of these rushed & slight poems work by way of creating a hermetic & closed subject composed of disconnected…