by John Deming | Feb 17, 2025 | Uncategorized
The ultimate futility of human endeavor is a pleasure in Engine Empire, a new triptych of poems by Cathy Park Hong. She begins in the boomtowns of the old west, pinballs over to what she has called a “fantastical reimagining of present day industrial China,” and...
by John Deming | Jan 18, 2025 | Uncategorized
What More Can I Say As James Wright struggled towards the loosening of the tight iambics which had brought him to notice in the first place, he seems to have struggled with the difference between emotional honesty and the traditional demands of form. I go back to his...
by John Deming | Jan 18, 2025 | Uncategorized
“When the world was ending, liquidators came.” Kerri Webster’s poems are fiery and verbose. She injects the biblical-apocalyptic into the seeming mendacity of chain stores, thrift shops, big skies, and small airports. Her concerns become an unfamiliar kind of unease,...
by John Deming | Jan 18, 2025 | Uncategorized
“I did not comprehend desire as a deadly force until –” Chronic speaks to the obsessions of the imagination, the intellect, and the heart, as well as to the modern “deranging” of the landscape and the body. Eschewing the conventional prologue poem, Powell structures...
by John Deming | Mar 7, 2024 | Uncategorized
“I find it hard to write even today about this tremendous beast,” Indran Amirthanayagam writes in the preface to The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems, referring to the 2004 natural disaster that took the lives of over 225,000 victims in southeast Asia. On December 26,...
