NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

Lee Upton’s Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles is a dense work wrapped in a short body. Originally from Michigan, the Midwest comes through Upton’s poetry in a similar way to a classic James Wright poem. It is there when she wants it to be, but she has the control to stray from it when necessary. Many of these poems are closer in scope to Charles Wright, the current Poet Laureate, and readers of her 2005 publication Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Gluck, and Carson will see how they’ve influenced her writing throughout this collection. Continue reading “Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles”

“This letter is about our lives simultaneously, and the mess of memories and body parts that emerges from our selves.” Thus writes the contemporary narrator to Herculine Barbin, an intersexed person born 1838, given a surgical sex reassignment which led to his/her suicide at twenty-nine in 1868. There are about fifteen ways to have an intersexed body, from not XX (female) and not XY (male) to complete gonadal dysgenesis. An intersexed body automatically makes one an intersexed person. The intersexed person does not fall within the guidelines of the social organization based on the clear-cut sexes, male and female, which, in turn, is amenable to the prescribed roles of gender. Continue reading “Dear Herculine”

“This is not the story of Katrina, of flood waters rising and then receding,” the prologue of The Parish: An AmeriCorps Story lets readers know. One could argue that it’s not even “An AmeriCorps Story” either. The Parish is a story of finding purpose and direction in a place that feels devoid of nearly everything—a story of finding purpose and direction in one’s self. Continue reading “The Parish”

My Feelings, the aptly primal title of poet and memoirist Nick Flynn’s fourth poetry collection, appropriately marks the book as the end product of long winnowing—an unequivocally subjective appraisal of life’s equivocations. In My Feelings, Flynn brings a memoirist’s robust conception of personal history to the page, crafting finely textured poems about what it means to live in the ever-growing aftermath called the present. To underscore the subjective nature of his collection, Flynn even includes a disclaimer telling readers that “[t]he word ‘my’ in the title is meant to signify the author.” Continue reading “My Feelings”

According to the author, poetry anthologies are “like a museum exhibition.” They certainly suit every imaginable reading need: fulfilling the core curriculum; completing the home, school, or public library; satisfying the rare book collector; providing access to a favorite writer in one place. Now there is an exceptional anthology about poetry that is both quotable and useful. Readers of The Oregonian are already familiar with poet David Biespiel’s monthly column that ran between 2003 and 2013. Now selections from the series (ended by the author, not the newspaper) are available in A Long High Whistle; Selected Columns on Poetry. Continue reading “A Long High Whistle”

In these eleven essays that make up Cannot Stay: Essays on Travel, Kevin Oderman journeys widely: from Latvia to Italy to Turkey; from Indonesia to Cambodia to Vietnam. Oderman does not feign to completely absorb the cultures in which he travels. Who could in a week or a month? No, he does something better; he delves into an aspect or a couple aspects of a culture or its history. These aspects—whether a painting, a dance, a temple, a house, or a puppets show—he describes so intricately that, while I read, his obsessions became my obsessions, and, when I finished, I remembered my own obsessions, and was inspired to explore them with the same kind of passion and precision. Continue reading “Cannot Stay”

The particulars of a Catholic girlhood have endured through centuries. Friends, enemies, and colleagues never tire of offering unsolicited psychoanalyses of that guilt-laden live, learn, and worship by rote existence. What outsiders will never understand is that abiding by those rules leads—if one is willing—to a freedom they can never appreciate. Continue reading “A Portal to Vibrancy”

A good poem places pressure on language in an interesting way. This mantra can be peeled from the pages of Seth Abramson’s Metamericana. However, his secret seems to be that a good poem places pressure on ideas in an interesting way—that a good idea places pressure on old ideas in an interesting way. Philosophy places pressure on technology and technology places pressure on philosophy. All of this interacts in a swirling and kaleidoscopic manner. Continue reading “Metamericana”

Hemmed in by questions, suspended over days that mete out incremental evidence, with an investigative protagonist alternating between the archive and the street, this little chapbook—a/0—is an exemplar of the detective genre. But it is so much stranger than most. One wants to say Pynchon or Murakami. No usual suspects here, and the universe is not what you think. Continue reading “a/0”

“Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.” So reads the one sentence biographical author note as retained in this new edition of Short Talks, the poet Anne Carson’s first book of poetry originally published by Brick Books in 1992. In the years since its publication Carson has made a considerable name for herself as a poet, essayist, and astutely adept translator of Greek, with her translation of Sappho in particular garnering much well-deserved acclaim. While Carson has always kept her personal details on the relative down low even as she has, at times, courted a fair bit of notoriety, and while concision is a definitive hallmark of her oeuvre, the brevity of this bio note is thus at once both disarming and appealingly elusive, especially for a poet of her stature. Continue reading “Short Talks”

A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write opens with “A Room in London,” a rumination on the physical space Melissa Pritchard occupied while temporarily living and writing in a borrowed London flat. This particularly brief piece (four pages) introduces the collection by touching on topics more thoroughly explored later in the book: Pritchard describes herself at work, presents her belief in writing as a spiritual—often religious—act, and embraces the essay’s ability to successfully grow around an ill-defined plot. Continue reading “A Solemn Pleasure”

It’s taken me a long time to write this review, at least six months according to the file creation date, and longer than that based on the date on my notes and the date on the book. But Natural History Rape Museum has been in my thoughts all this time, plaiting its Plath-sharp shrieks into my mind. Continue reading “Natural History Rape Museum (TRIGGER WARNING)”

In a family saga that spans two countries, a half-century, and three generations, Shelley Ettinger’s Vera’s Will is both historical document and social commentary, deftly couched in beautifully written fiction. The story opens with Randy, a young lesbian, reflecting on her past while attending her Grandmother Vera’s funeral. It is at this emotionally tumultuous service where Randy meets and reacquaints with her grandmother’s friends that she has a startling realization: both her deceased grandmother and her favorite aunt are also gay. Continue reading “Vera’s Will”

Jessamyn Hope’s debut novel opens with Adam, a 26-year-old drug-addicted burnout, fleeing from New York City to Israel. Adam’s caretaker and closest companion, his grandfather, has recently died. During the airplane ride, Adam broods on whether American authorities are following him. Experiencing withdrawals and toting an odd assortment of belongings, including an elaborate gold brooch, he volunteers to work on a kibbutz. He’s searching for someone. The circumstances of his grandfather’s death, the significance of the brooch, and the identity of whom Adam is searching for drive the thoughtfully plotted Safekeeping. Continue reading “Safekeeping”

Unaccompanied Minors, winner of the New American Fiction Prize in 2013, is a slim volume of seven short stories about young adults facing teenage pregnancy, homelessness, prostitution, the death of a child on his babysitter’s watch, and so on. “Shelter,” the first story in the book, is an odd choice for an opening, in that the story largely relies on the limited shock value of having homeless teenagers for its protagonists. Reminiscent of Dorothy Allison’s project to represent the lives of young poor women from the South, Jones’s story is less angry, but similarly features young characters who hide their vulnerability behind tough facades and speech that is likewise patina’d with derogatory slang. Continue reading “Unaccompanied Minors”

For there is something to be said for the even spacing of certain
   kinds of structures.
For it is important to love the spaces in between—Remember the
   interstitial bins and shapes that accommodate.
     – “Jubilate: Burden, Kansas”

I admit, it wasn’t until I came across the above lines, 20 pages into the book, that I began to feel some affinity for Siobhan Scarry’s poetry. Continue reading “Pilgrimly”

Patricia Waters’s Fallen Attitudes beautifully betrays her artistic and intellectual maturity. This is not novice poetry, but poetry in which scenes, locations, history, and memory are culled for what they cannot possess rather than for epistemological revelations. Waters is not attempting to prove anything, to justify a life lived a certain way; this is a memoir of letting go of proof and justification, of finding peace with whatever remains, and what remains seems to be a love. Continue reading “Fallen Attitudes”

Haiku is excessive. What luxury. In five mere words, Ken Mikolowski can do what the ancients needed seventeen syllables to accomplish in his book That That. Take the poem “No more / and / no less.” This says it all. It says everything that is needed to be said. It is a commentary on the state of the art and on the personal lives that we all carry in ourselves. Math uses simplification to produce elegant equations. In this same vein, Mikolowski uses reduction to get to the heart of the issue. These poems take on enormous universal equations by mimicking tiny proverbs. It is a great read for the age of Tweets. It reaches hearts and minds with the wisdom of Solomon using the tactics of a Facebook advertisement. Continue reading “That That”

During the Occupy Movement in New York City when The People literally took over Zuccotti Park, poet Filip Marinovich was right there in the mix, helping to set up and run the People’s Library and reading his poems over the People’s Mic, “the people’s mic is intoxicating / that’s why I am its pauper king” (“Zuccotti Park Fugue State”). The poems gathered in Wolfman Librarian stem directly from Marinovich’s experience with Occupy. Continue reading “Wolfman Librarian”

“Somebody pour me / a fresh Pepsi?” Fanny Says is an amalgam of the south. A woman striving for class in a society that worked hard against her. The author Nickole Brown peels away the caricature that could be Frances Lee. What is revealed is Fanny, an archetypal southern woman, yes, but a participant in a modern and changing world. There is a universalism at work in Fanny Says that Brown allows and directs rather than forms and shifts. It is a dense work of poems, functioning as a memoir and a history lesson by way of the comedian. Brown is always tender but does not shy from exposing faults and social problems. Her ability to record and recreate the things her grandmother said is a prowess far beyond her. The reader is so immersed in Fanny it is as if we know her. Getting to know Fanny is like examining America, first the shoes, then the belt, and finally the hair-do. Continue reading “Fanny Says”

The poems in Sean Bishop’s elegiac debut collection The Night We’re Not Sleeping In seethe with animosity—sometimes humorously, sometimes righteously—toward all manner of received wisdom about life, death, grief, and consolation. Selected by Susan Mitchell as the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry, the collection centers around the death of the speaker’s father, with several longer poetic sequences throughout the book’s four sections interrupting and elaborating on similarly turbulent themes. Continue reading “The Night We’re Not Sleeping In”

Magda Szabó wrote this well-known Hungarian classic in 1987, and fortunately The New York Review of Books reissued it with an excellent introduction by Ali Smith. The novel is about the relationship between a young writer (the narrator) and her husband with their housecleaner Emerence, who proves to be so much more than that. The book could be viewed as autobiographical because the narrator, now a famous writer, is looking back on herself as young when she first met the old woman Emerence who announces, “I don’t wash just anyone’s dirty laundry.” She arrives at the apartment wearing, as she always does, a headscarf covering her hair and face like a veil. Hiding herself, the headscarf serves as the equivalent of Emerence’s locked door at her own villa. Continue reading “The Door”

Editors Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney have assembled, edited, and published this brilliant collection of specialized coming-of-age novellas—each one special because it is composed entirely of cohesive, yet stand-alone works of flash fiction—defined in the introduction as stories of 1,000 words or less. Helpful, informative essays by each of the five authors whose stories appear in this collection expound upon their creative process in birthing these works. Part craft-of-writing book and part novellas-in-flash collection, this unique text is both educational and entertaining: an excellent textbook or self-instructional manual on the form. Continue reading “My Very End of the Universe”

In Gephyromania, which means the love of building bridges, we are given a “subtextual consciousness of queer” per the author, TC Tolbert, who is a genderqueer feminist poet and teacher. S/he is co-editor for The Feminist Wire and a curator for Trickhouse, an online cross-genre arts journal. Tolbert also founded Made for Flight, a youth empowerment program using writing and kite building, commemorating murdered transgender people, to bring awareness about homophobia and transphobia. Continue reading “Gephyromania”

Intimate family relationships can startle us when we recognize that, despite our familiarity, we’re actually strangers who keep many secrets from one another. Such is the case for Barbara Pupnick Blumfield, who discovers as a teenage girl her mother’s infidelity. Author Michelle Brafman explores three generations of mother-daughter relationships in Orthodox and Chasidic Jewish families through the eyes of Barbara, contrasting her life in the 1970s when she first discovered her mother’s unfaithfulness, with her life as a grown woman in 2009, where she has a teen daughter of her own. Continue reading “Washing the Dead”

I listed My Body is a Book of Rules by Elissa Washuta as one of the books that I was currently reading online and saw that a friend of mine listed it as one of her “to-read” books. That has happened a few times but I’ve never been as happy to see it as I was for this book. It’s very possible that I feel so attached to it because I’m a 20-something girl (who still finds it weird to call herself a “woman” since that seems to imply some level of adulthood) just out of a grad school trying to figure out what to do from here. The experiences that Washuta describes aren’t all ones that I can relate to. She discusses mental illness, being raped, and being a minority in such a way that, while a reader may not be able to relate, it’s easy to empathize with her. Continue reading “My Body is a Book of Rules”

If you are looking for a fast-paced, succinct, plot-driven book then The Descartes Highlands by Eric Gamalinda may not be for you. If, however, you are looking for a thoughtful, slow-burning character-driven story then settle right in. It is a story that follows two adopted brothers who grow up in different homes after being sold in the Philippines by their American father. Gamalinda’s novel delves into a world inhabited by an American draft-dodger living in the Philippines who ends up needing to sell his two sons to other foreigners, each burdened with their own grief and turmoil. We spend about a third of our time with the father in flashbacks and each of his sons in the present as they try to find out about their origins and deal with how their unique beginnings impact their lives. Continue reading “The Descartes Highlands”

Ira Sukrungruang takes readers through the gamut in this collection of essays, Southside Buddhist. Gamut of what? You name it: emotions, literary styles of nonfiction, life experiences, ages, cultures—all in this one remarkable collection of essays. Continue reading “Southside Buddhist”

I just finished reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a novel in which the narrator desires that she and her sister resist the socio-economic structure of 1950s New England and reside, instead, on the moon. They finally do achieve this goal by converting their large house into a smaller living space, boarded-up and isolated from the outside world. In novels like Castle, women often reinterpret the boundaries of living spaces in their writing partly because traditional domestic contracts and spaces constrain emotion, creativity, and grief. In her book of poems titled The Sun & the Moon, Kristina Marie Darling contributes to this collective literary voice that unfetters domestic space as her speaker grieves and examines a past marital relationship. The Sun and the Moon, representing respectively a husband and wife, are always at opposite poles in this space that reels with cinematic flashes of memory and the ghosts that inhabit memory over time. Continue reading “The Sun & The Moon”

Throughout John Sakkis’s The Islands, a polyvocal weave of declarative refrains sound out in dizzying display. Across the book’s five sections appear poems, often in set series, presenting a hybrid mix of memoir, lyric, historical investigation, and daily documents full of dispatch concerning discursive news the poet’s ear has picked up on. We see in section three “Tangrams The New Collective,” the speaker’s concern throughout remains with “The salt of human projects,” in the face of which, Sakkis declares: “I go in. I am in bits.” What’s left for the poems are scattered fragments of events, both imagined and other, from out of which both structure and content prove to be derived. Continue reading “The Islands”

Bruce Covey’s Change Machine is a lively book that takes a humorous approach to formal experimentation. Among other ideas, Covey examines how the man-made world intersects with the natural one. Here, “man-made” includes human inventions both critical—mathematics, industry, philosophy—as well as trivial—puns, pop singers, imitations. The speaker’s voice is conversational but emotionally cool, and its consistency holds together a varied array of poetic forms including sonnets, near-sonnets, and imitations of iconic poems by Frank O’Hara, Alice Notley, and Ted Berrigan. Continue reading “Change Machine”

Mary Jo Bang is a slippery poet, with a mind that often seems a few seconds ahead of itself. A quick glance at the cover of her new book, The Last Two Seconds, perfectly encapsulates this kind of speed: the monorail that has just slipped from our frame of vision, the typography of the title trailing like a futurist contrail. It is this trailing, however, that is a crucial point—this collection is not about the next two seconds, but the last—as in the last two seconds you’ve just spent reading this sentence. Continue reading “The Last Two Seconds”

Theatergoers will be reminded of Yasmina Reza’s well-known plays Art and God of Carnage in this short story collection Happy Are the Happy. In spite of no paragraphing in each of the short stories, they flow with perfect dialogue, brief but definitive settings, and situations involving both humorous and sad bad behavior and embarrassment. Fiction allows Reza to exhibit her lovely style, vivid succinct descriptions, and ironic truisms and insights. Continue reading “Happy Are the Happy”

William Black’s stunning and stirring debut collection consists of twelve short stories set in Appalachia’s Northeastern Pennsylvania, where rugged hills and peaceful valleys landscape both the terrain and the soul. The evocative language in which Inheritances is written mirrors the highs and lows of his characters’ emotions as Black leads us into and immerses us in their lives. Each story’s intriguing beginning and thought-provoking ending make this collection a keeper—one you’ll find yourself reaching for every time you need a dose of the valor and courage his characters demonstrate. Continue reading “Inheritances”

Starlight In Two Million bills itself as a neo-scientific novella. Amy Catanzano works in quantum poetics, a lofty goal. She states that she tries to amplify the hallucinatory experience of the novel by changing perspectives and seeks to find a fourth person perspective in the mode of time. Detached and somewhat nonlinear, the novel moves from an outré perspective and gives itself to the form much of the time, posing a challenge for the reader looking for one. The work attempts to produce a feeling, a controlled navigation through a hypercube. Continue reading “Starlight in Two Million”

This is a found poetry book . . . of sorts. William Shatner did Palin on the “Tonight Show.” He took Sarah Palin’s farewell speech and delivered verbatim in a beatnik style with an accompaniment of bongos and stand-up bass. Hart Seely, Syracuse Post-Standard columnist, seemed to hit gold with Pieces of Intelligence, his collections of poems that he ripped from Donald Rumsfeld. Nicole Mauro takes the idea to the next logical level in Tax-Dollar Super Sonnet, working with the fervor of a mash-up DJ. The borrowed speeches span the history of America and bristle with the newness of the modern age. These poems have a real political edge added back to them, the words reorganizing themselves to fortify new points. Continue reading “Tax-Dollar Super Sonnet, Featuring Sarah Palin as Poet”

It’s funny to think of No Girls, No Telephones in the context of the fan genre, like everyone’s favorite 50 Shades of Gray, but let’s do that for just one wincingly good second. Okay. Of course, this isn’t 50 Shades of Gray. This is poetry, for one. It’s a collaboration between Brittany Cavallaro and Rebecca Hazelton, two talented and accomplished poets. And perhaps most importantly, it riffs not off of a tweeny bestseller but one of the most sophisticated, startling, and idiomatic literary works of the American tradition, John Berryman’s Dream Songs. Continue reading “No Girls No Telephones”

Every line, phrase, and syllable of Kimberly Burwick’s Good Night Brother is thick with a language that perhaps only angels know. As I read these dense, imagistic lines, I recall the charismatic churches of my youth when, at Sunday morning worship, any number of individuals might erupt into an otherworldly song in “tongues,” coming from the spirit within. Perhaps Burwick has such a spirit—a poetic spirit that transforms “milkweed,” “geese,” “pheasants,” “berries,” “roads,” and “flies” into abstractions, the reader reveling in the feel of this strange language passing over the pores of the page. Continue reading “Good Night Brother”

Un-Sight/ Un-Sound (delirium X.) is published by gnOme press, which specializes in anonymous, pseudepigraphical and apocryphal works; a press that also eliminates the name of the author because “The self in no way matters . . . (the reader) is any one and I (the author) am also anyone. . . .” The author, represented by the initial M, has written a text in three parts, each part its own distinct structure of fragments, each of the structures with its own specific effect. Across all three parts, the fragments of syntax elements yield each part’s content. This is not a theoretical exercise, but a language born of the body, the senses, the gut. . . born of the anguish and power of flesh in the world. Continue reading “Un-Sight/ Un-Sound (delirium X.)”

Along with Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Twain, and Anonymous, the authors of this anthology are among the most recognized in literature. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were also preservationists, transcribing fairy tales verbally passed down from generation to the next. With book in hand—something increasingly common during the course of the nineteenth century—the “Story Teller” no longer had to rely on memory. Since their publication in 1812, these stories found their way into other narrative forms including visual and/or animated art, music, opera, ballet, and film. Artists from Walter Crane to children sitting at the kitchen table have drawn Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White, and Rapunzel. Continue reading “The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm”

In The Year of Perfect Happiness, nobody is perfect. Under a veneer of normalcy and seeming perfection lie malice, cunning, chicanery, and evil. In people like you and me that populate the landscape of Middle America—the ones with dreams and aspirations to have good jobs, a family, career and friends—have a little malice in us. Characters in Becky Adnot-Haynes’s The Year of Perfect Happiness, a collection of ten short stories, are etched with the slightest of kinks, of imperfections, that allow the evil to seep through, making the ordinary seem that much less so. Female protagonists are drawn with an eye towards the slightly weird, the eccentric, with tinges of idiotic. The characters stay with you long after you’ve flipped the page. Continue reading “The Year of Perfect Happiness”

The characters in Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez’s stories navigate many worlds, literally and figuratively traversing continents, global metropolises, national borders, and epistemic boundaries, all in a quest for that universal human need for belonging and connectedness. In a collection of fourteen stories, Vaquera-Vasquez, an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico, draws the blinds into a sub-culture of Eses, hombres, border crossers, and all things Chicano. Continue reading “One Day I’ll Tell You the Things I’ve Seen”

In the dedication Chris Green states that there is “no straightforward compensation.” The rest of the poems follow Joseph Brodsky’s quote during his employment trial, “Everything was interesting to me. I changed jobs because I wanted to learn more about life, about people.” There is a Midwestern, blue collar motif to the language that runs through the poems. There is plenty of indirect and direct evidence of the observations of a poet from Chicago. Many times I thought of Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich’s exposé on living a low-wage lifestyle. Continue reading “Résumé”

This is not a pipe. The word is not the thing. The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom shares this sentiment. Noah Eli Gordon presents a modern treason of symbol. His words take flight in the very airplanes he describes. The trajectory is set by meta ontology. As the poems move forward and take shape, there is the sense that a message was thought of before the descriptions, that the writing has an agenda. However, there is a playful sense of tumbling through, that the words are allowing each other to create the next one. The message of origins of language and the etymology of our very ideas are shrouded in mystery. Continue reading “The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom”

Every evening in the city
is a deep pool of wine

Everyone who lives in the city
is drunk with it

And cannot leave

            They are surrounded by friends

Continue reading “Surrounded by Friends”

Ann Pancake’s collection of novellas and short stories, is steeped in the culture and dialect of generations of rural West Virginians; moreover, it’s awash with heartache, brutal honesty, mistrust of strangers, and the necessary and stubborn resolve that illuminates the mountain-state people’s passion for family and the place they call home. Continue reading “Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley”

Mary Biddinger’s fourth poetry collection, A Sunny Place with Adequate Water, grapples with social mores, loneliness, and isolation through serial non-sequitors and questions that seem sincerely non-rhetorical, yet go unanswered. Tonally, A Sunny Place with Adequate Water is reminiscent of the poetry of Mary Ruefle, or of Steven Millhauser’s prose poem novella, Enchanted Night. Continue reading “A Sunny Place with Adequate Water”

Diana Hamilton’s Universe is one of the tightest projects I’ve ever read: a chapbook length poem on ethics, broken into two sections (one roughly on property/possession, the other on race) and comprised largely of analytical propositions angularly cut into strikingly short lines. “You and I exist in a civil condition” the speaker asserts. Doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? Continue reading “Universe”

Alex Green’s collection of short prose is aptly titled Emergency Anthems. Brooklyn Arts Press wisely bills the book as a collection of “Short Fiction/Prose Poems,” leaving elbow-patched professor types to duke it out over finer genre distinctions. Alas, I regularly cling to genre like it’s a life-raft in wild waters. The stories/poems are presented as block paragraphs with justified left and right margins. The majority of these shorts don’t feature any traditional narrative arc, no building and releasing of tension. Without the floatation device of genre, the word “Anthem” feels like an appropriate designation for Green’s short bursts of prose. Continue reading “Emergency Anthems”

The poems in Sylph, Abigail Cloud’s debut collection, are comprised of multiple balancing acts. They are graceful, self-assured poems, beautifully executed with a tightly focused imagistic sensibility. But they are also searching, inquisitive poems—their arrivals are real-time events, self-discoveries. They have an airy quality, as the title of the collection would suggest (there are “wings” everywhere), yet are also deeply rooted in the material world. They are as at-home in myth and the spirit world, or the haunting voices in archives, as they are in the garden and in the home. Continue reading “Sylph”