NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

Oh, the teenage years. Insecurities, fights between friends, disagreements with parents, first loves, and broken hearts. Leap by Jodi Lundgren has it all and more. Natalie Ferguson is a fifteen-year-old who finds herself battling drugs and drinking, body issues, insecurities about dating, the struggle to hold onto childhood friends all while coping with divorced parents who are ready to move on with their lives. The amount of things on her plate would be overwhelming for anyone and through diary entries the reader goes through it all with her. Natalie’s one savior is her love of dance though she finds herself at odds with her strict dance teacher. While she explores a newfound love of modern dance, Natalie comes into her own and finds confidence in her ability to handle all of the crazy things life has thrown her way. Continue reading “Leap”

In the past decade, death penalty defense lawyers have taken to the practice of outlining the life history of their clients to juries, including the circumstances that led to the murder for which they face death. The goal is the jury’s sympathy, the hope that they might spare them from death. I always wondered about whether these same juries end up with sympathy for the lawyers themselves. A life of death penalty defense, with so many sleepless nights and last-minute scares, often seems like a sadomasochistic, or at the very least, all-consuming career choice. Continue reading “The Autobiography of an Execution”

Cribbing from Leo Tolstoy, poets of place are all alike in how that particular locale obsesses them, whereas poets from Detroit are uniquely autochthonous. Jim Daniels, Toi Derricotte, Robert Hayden, and Philip Levine are four writers who come to mind, and each wears their (sometimes bittersweet) affection for Detroit like a permanent tattoo. Michael Heffernan, along with the above poets, has spent more time away from his native city than within it, yet no matter where he goes—Kansas, Washington, Ireland, Arkansas—he totes Detroit’s DNA along with him, whether he chooses to or not. Continue reading “At the Bureau of Divine Music”

Right off the bat (no pun intended), Jenny Shank’s novel, The Ringer, appealed to me. The story takes place in the Mile High City, Denver, Colorado—a location I still consider to be home even though I haven’t lived there in eight years—and I was looking forward to being transported back to the wide-open skies, to the dry, thin air of the Rockies, and to the familiar sights and streets of my youth. And I wasn’t disappointed. Shank’s sense of place is strong, and throughout the novel I experienced many wonderful moments of nostalgia and recognition—Hey! I’ve eaten at that restaurant! I know that newscaster! I remember the daily, summer thundershowers! Continue reading “The Ringer: A Novel”

Timothy O’Keefe’s The Goodbye Town is brimming with small, intricate images, stacked piecemeal upon one another to create the brilliant and sensuous world of each individual poem. Space is not only put to remarkable use by the poet in a structural sense, but is a complex recurrent theme as well. The occupation of space and—conversely—absence, are ever-present throughout O’Keefe’s work. The poems’ people are shadows and outlines or fleeting memories captivated only by the noises they produce. Continue reading “The Goodbye Town”

Arpine Konyalian Grenier’s fourth full-length book, The Concession Stand: Exaptation at the Margins, is a genre-bending collection of what can best be described as lyric essays. In essence, the pieces in this book are enacting the exaptation that they advocate: the exaptation of language to connect with a collective identity, one that allows for new ways of communication that are not hindered by culture/hierarchy/power/history but are inclusive to all. Continue reading “The Concession Stand”

Part mystery, biography, memoir, history, narrative nonfiction escapade, Deborah Baker’s The Convert doesn’t fit in any one category. Like its subject, Margaret Marcus/Maryam Jameelah, the book is a misfit. And like creative nonfiction should, it poses questions, and in wrestling with those questions, it jigs loose more questions, bigger questions, questions that tie you in knots, give you an unscratchable itch, or maybe incite you to hurl something not unlike a hardback volume across the room. In any case, it is a book you want to discuss. Continue reading “The Convert”

Titling a collection of short stories In Which Brief Stories Are Told may seem rather obvious, but Phillip Sterling’s tales of loss, detachment, and mystery reveal the complications inherent in narrative and character, and call into question the relationship between narrator and audience. Throughout, he brings to life characters we ordinarily might not give a second glance: bystanders and passers-by who, like the reader, catch only glimpses of the greater plot in which they play a role. Continue reading “In Which Brief Stories Are Told”

Curses and Wishes, Carl Adamshick’s award-winning debut collection, is driven by brief retrospective and introspective poems, compacting an overwhelming sense of loss in America. Adamshick at once laments and celebrates different ways of American life, ranging from small-town farms of the Midwest to the international scale of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Following in the tradition of American poetry that engages with the American spirit, Adamshick transfers the fervor of Whitman’s long, sprawling lines into short-lined, energetic poems that make for a fast and invigorating read. Curses and Wishes will entrance any reader with concerns for the fate of the American landscape and its people. Continue reading “Curses and Wishes”

Helsinki, as a collection, almost reads as one long poem. The poems are nearly uniform in length and line-length, all one-stanza, lacking punctuation, title-less. The poems are characterized by their drive, their unceasing motion that sweeps the reader along with it. It is the work of an author with focus; the collection’s themes are primarily on love and war. The love object, a reoccurring character, is Julia. The book first begins with discussing war and death: Continue reading “Helsinki”

Fallout from a real revolution can be worse than its cause. Mass murder, reckless replacement of proven agrarian practices, and imprisoning the educated are just a few documented aftershocks. Fictional revolutions and their resulting chaos can be equally atrocious, as it is in Bogdan Suceav?‘s Coming from an Off-Key Time. Continue reading “Coming from an Off-Key Time”

Fanny Howe’s latest work, Come and See, explores themes of spirituality and war with a concern for children growing up in the midst of war-torn countries. Spirituality, a theme that can be seen in Howe’s work as a whole, rises more in the form of a seeker, one questioning religion, rather than an adherent. Continue reading “Come and See”

With Privado Daniel Tiffany offers up a pop-cultural remix of sorts on, as he tells it, “cadences used by the armed services in marching drills,” so every “poem” or “section” here is titled “Cadence.” However, the nearest he allows for hitting a rhythmic stride is the oft repeated: Continue reading “Privado”

In Greek mythology, there is perhaps no myth so painfully evocative and morally instructive as that of Daedalus and Icarus. Daedalus, the brilliant architect of the Minotaur’s labyrinth, constructs wings of feather and wax so that he and his son can escape their imprisonment. They are almost successful, until Icarus, forgetting his father’s warnings, flies too close to the sun and his wings melt, plunging him to his death. Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s The Requited Distance mines this myth, as well as the other stories related to Daedalus, for their rich and mournful underpinnings. Griffiths presents the conception and birth of the Minotaur, the construction of the labyrinth, Daedalus’s attempted murder of his nephew Perdix, and Icarus’s fatal flight through many different eyes (including that of a watching fig tree), capturing profound emotions with her lush descriptions. Throughout, we witness the cost of unwieldy desire and ambition. Continue reading “The Requited Distance”

Atlanta in the late seventies and early eighties, two women, two daughters, one man: such are the major players in Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow. Delicate and tender without being cloying, this novel explores not only the strangeness of bigamy but also what it means to be a wife, to be a sister, to be a family. The premise of Jones’s plot is straightforward: James Witherspoon, a black man who runs his own limousine company, has married two women and fathered a daughter with each. Only one wife, Gwen, and her daughter, Dana, know of the existence James’s other family (Laverne, the wife, and Chaurisse, the daughter). Continue reading “Silver Sparrow”

Zone is a contemporary Homeric epic, 500 pages of one sentence–and it works. Enard’s message is that no matter where the conflict takes place and what the issues are, the human atrocities are the same. Therefore, the style allows for the account of one savage leader and his victims to bump up against others with not even a comma in between: Continue reading “Zone”

Reading the first, very short chapter of Michael Kimball’s Us, I knew the book was going to make me cry repeatedly. A husband wakes to his wife having a seizure in their bed, and from that point we experience the complete change to their lives as he cares for her until her death. Their story is told from the point of view of the old man and there is no dialogue in the book. We are completely immersed in his experience as he tries to keep his wife alive and then helps her prepare for her death. I say “experience” because he is so unsure, scared, and sad that his descriptions are very physical because he doesn’t quite know how to process them: “I couldn’t feel any breath coming out of her anymore. I held onto her nose and tried to breathe some of my breath into her mouth. There didn’t seem to be enough air inside of me anymore to get her to breathe.” There are dozens of moments like this through the book, ones that start with a play-by-play description of what is happening and end in heart-wrenching realizations. Continue reading “Us”

At first glance Michael Bible’s Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City is adorable, akin to an oversized coaster and just a quarter-inch thick, but inside, the prose is blunt and cut-down, and the illustrations match: page sixty’s is of black swans smoking cigarettes in a white lake. Continue reading “Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City”

In The Bigger World, the reader is presented with the “character poems of Noelle Kocot,” as noted on the title page. And each poem does present a new character or two and a glimpse of their lives. The poems, written always as a single stanza, read like fables or fairy tales with their fantastic elements—whether it is Horatia giving birth to a fully grown man, a phoenix talking to a monk, the head of a woman becoming a house plant, or a wing-faced dentist who used to love war—and with their seemingly moralizing messages. At the end of “Rainbow Lanes,” Kocot writes: Continue reading “The Bigger World”

William Corbett’s The Whalen Poem is an enticing experiment and one I’m sure many poets would love to try. He describes the long poem as a response to reading Philip Whalen’s Collected Poems. Whalen’s style and influence permeate the book, but while Corbett revels in Whalen’s signature stream-of-consciousness approach, it is clear that the consciousness propelling the poem is distinctly different. Corbett’s poem is full of names and anecdotes, baseball statistics, and literary references. He seems to savor the sound and rhythms of these people and places he mentions, and it is fascinating to watch him sample culture and current events in this way. Still, the book is at its most compelling when Corbett delves into something closer at hand: Continue reading “The Whalen Poem”

Joshua Edwards and Van Edwards’ Campeche, an ekphrastic collection of poems and photographs, meditates on the self as a song caught within the larger music of the world in decline. The book has a unique architecture, which derives its structure from both its historical setting and subtle references to ancient Greek and Judeo-Christian apocrypha. Arranged in seven sections, and consisting of thirty poems (three of which are translations) and forty photographs, the book launches its lyrical flights over Galveston Island, grounding symbolic expression in a real place already imbued with intrigue—the 18^th century pirate Jean Lafitte, a man without a nation-state to call home, named this island “Campeche.” Continue reading “Campeche”

Seven short stories, linked by the event and resonance of September 11^th, constitute Jess Row’s Nobody Ever Gets Lost. Modern, pertinent, worldly, these stories speak directly to the reader, drawing one in, compelling one to keep reading, to engage. Row’s prose is self-conscious but never awkward, rich and rewarding. Continue reading “Nobody Ever Gets Lost”

The idea of the suburbs as a “Utopia minus” comes to the fore in a collection that laments the rise of the suburbs as a “rise into ruin.” Susan Briante has written a bold second collection that tackles issues plaguing the American landscape and, even more urgently, the American people. Utopia Minus challenges notions of industrial and social progress in emboldened poems, fearlessly examining the plight of current American culture and even addressing the wars in the Middle East. These poems seethe with a silent anger and worry for the future. Continue reading “Utopia Minus”

If you’re like me, the title Destroyer and Preserver will make you expect a speaker who finds himself filling both roles at once, somehow. You’ll long to embrace the conflict of some tragic irony. You’ll look forward to witnessing small, tender moments nestling together in the shadow of something supremely horrible. Continue reading “Destroyer and Preserver”

Matthew Henriksen’s poems are fun to read. They aren’t elaborate constructions, even when concerned with painful circumstances or disturbing displays of psychological torment, neither are they simple in statement or form. Tony Tost’s blurb mentions T.S. Eliot and Gram Parsons. This works as Henriksen is of a generation for whom turning from reading Eliot to listening to Parsons without missing a beat comes easily. (Parsons, after all is very much in Eliot’s lineage—wealthy white and southern, Parsons was a musical star who readily mixed country with rock, his personal setbacks and limitations reflected by his art and life.) Henriksen, however, is not merely deploying a grab bag of insights he picked up from the college dormitory. So, while there’s a bit of looseness deployed under cover of freehanded collage in these poems, Henriksen surprises as being far subtler a poet than to boringly lay everything straight out. Continue reading “Ordinary Sun”

If you’re the sort of reader who likes a nice, linear plot and a trustworthy narrator, then Chelsea Martin’s charming collection of stories, The Really Funny Thing about Apathy, is probably not for you. If, on the other hand, you delight in the odd, the cerebral, the uncanny, and you love the possibility of language and the unexpectedness of the human brain, then by all means, go get your hands on a copy. Continue reading “The Really Funny Thing about Apathy”

Lizzy Acker’s book Monster Party is hard to categorize. Is it a fiction chapbook? A novella? A story cycle? Maybe a fictive autobiography? Maybe a collage of short-shorts? Or should we call it a badass bildungsromanesque manifesto with a poetic ode to the 90s computer game Oregon Trail thrown in? Whatever it is, it’s a must-read. Especially for all you 20 and 30-somethings who grew up on He-Man and Nick at Nite. And you literary types who have always wanted to do something gnarly and totally against-the-rules with metaphor. And especially all you who may be considering boob tubing it tonight—Acker’s protagonist would—but are thinking it’ll be loads more fun hanging out for eighty pages with a slacker tomboy named Lizzy who drools sarcasm, shoots Fourth-of-July bottle rockets out of her mouth, and accidentally participates in the murder of a possum because she thinks it’s mortally wounded when the poor critter is just playing dead. Trust me, friends. This hipster hip, tough girl, love-rock, indie narrative word-thing is for you. Continue reading “Monster Party”

Perhaps the highest praise I can offer Moore’s instructional book on writing the personal essay is this: when I started reading it, I had no intention or desire to write an essay, and now, having finished it, I already have a list of potential projects I’m ready to begin. His easygoing, conversational style and encouraging tone (“Everyone has bad days. So don’t beat yourself up about it”) make the book an easy read, and most of his advice is concrete and specific. Continue reading “Crafting the Personal Essay”

Craig Nova’s quirky memoir mixes his life as writer, father, and husband in a series of short essays that all revolve around his life as a fly fisher searching for the native brook trout. This reprint and expansion of the original 1999 publication incorporates simple prose with wit and humor. Although predominantly known as a fiction writer, Nova, in a series of twelve non-chronological essays, informs the reader about how he developed his obsession with fly-fishing alongside other stories about his shared passion with friends and family. These essays, with a charming voice, invite the reader to share with Nova in his memories and pieces of advice that enrich the memoir. Continue reading “Brook Trout and the Writing Life”

Jeremy Halinen’s debut book of poems, What Other Choice, is an urgent collection of poems, driven by acknowledging the physicality of being gay in spaces that do not always allow for it. Exploring bodies—“as if my body // had been the trap,” Halinen writes—through sex and through violence is a focus throughout the collection. Halinen writes the body as a thing understood and alien, as something presented and interpreted, as something that is not necessarily but also necessarily representative of the self: “If…this body / a magnet, // would you understand / why I was here?” Continue reading “What Other Choice”

Perishables is the winner of the publisher’s fiction chapbook contest, and it’s certainly prize-worthy work. Egnoski’s a fine storyteller and the four stories in this handsomely produced little chapbook provide strong support for the recent interest and increase in chapbook fiction. Continue reading “Perishables”

Composed of sixty-three petite fictions, Color Plates combines excellent prose with a unique organizing principle, making this a volume unlike any other. The stories are sorted into four books, each book containing prose relating to an artist: Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Mary Cassatt. Each of these books contains more than a dozen stories, which take their titles from the names of paintings by the artists – “Woman Fixing Her Stocking,” “The Boating Party,” or “The Dance Class,” for instance. Each title is accompanied by a brief description of the paintings while the stories that follow respond to, recreate, inhabit, and expand the world of these pictures. Continue reading “Color Plates”

This volume contains poems from Pratt’s two previous published collections, from an unpublished earlier manuscript, and new poems. The collection is bookended by poems that consider the poet in the world: an early poem (1986) that situates the poet “In the Woods” (“What’s he doing, you’d wonder, here in the very / Middle of the woods, shouldering logs from a stack / Someone cut and left so long ago”) and a new poem, “Resolution” that is decidedly more global in scope and perspective (“When the tsunami draws back its fistful of waters / And crushes the city, let me for once be ready /…When the suicide bomber squeezes the trigger / And fierce flames spurt and wild the body parts fly, / Let me be holding my lover or drinking my coffee // Let us be drinking our coffee, unprepared”). Continue reading “From the Box Marked Some Are Missing”

Clean energy, universal healthcare, and stress-free air travel are reality. There is no crime or homelessness. The universal language is called Cosmic. Political parties are banished to desert islands. Hamlet is still performed. All this and more is the world Italian anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza creates in The Year 3000: A Dream. Translated into English for the first time as part of The University of Nebraska’s “Bison Frontiers of the Imagination Series,” this entertaining 1897 novel has been rescued from the black hole of book oblivion. Continue reading “The Year 3000: A Dream”

Kindred’s poems are carefully composed examples of the successful intersection of lyric and narrative impulses. No Eden opens with “Prayer for Mrs. Snead,” which is representative of the poet’s style and sets the tone for the collection: Continue reading “No Eden”

Finalist for Canada’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, Alexander McLeod writes his first short story collection, Light Lifting, with intense physical details and mostly dark but realistic endings. Continue reading “Light Lifting”

The title of Maureen Thorson’s first full-length book Applies to Oranges announces the project’s aesthetic intentions with a sort of typographic pun. At first glance, your brain decodes the title as “Apples to Oranges” and, since you’re most likely an adult with years of experience reading and categorizing, the momentary discordance in discovering the intentional error likely pleases you as much as the first time you walked your stubborn, teenaged eyes up and down M.C. Escher’s infinite staircase to visit his impossible rooms. A sort of double sound pun (where one word sounds like another) for the page, the title readies us for the ways in which Thorson will break apart linguistic categories, subvert the order of things, and refashion the language of loss for her own uses. Continue reading “Applies to Oranges”

Rita Mae Reese’s The Alphabet Conspiracy is a book replete with anecdotes and snapshots of memory, ranging in subject matter from the religious to the informatively historical to the contemporary, which thoroughly explore both the whimsy and restrictions of language. The first poem in the collection, “Intercession,” is a sort of loose, and strikingly clever abecedarian, which sets the stage for the unpredictable throughout Reese’s book, and, by the nature of its form, hints at the way children are introduced to and subsequently forever influenced by language. There is a huge emphasis on the exploration of language throughout the book’s poems, with particular pieces devoted entirely to the complexities and nuances of the subject. Language as theme also works itself into poems dealing with much heavier subject matter. Reese is clearly a lover of the strange in words and thought, and seeks every opportunity to highlight it for the reader. Reese writes in the collection’s title poem: Continue reading “The Alphabet Conspiracy”

We tend to have expectations for who people should be, what things we should do, how language should act… all of these ideas for what the world and our lives should be like. Everything has its place. Claire Becker, in her collection of poetry, Where We Think It Should Go, asks us to take a step back from those traditional (mis)conceptions. She uses language to play with boundaries, and moves us to see that we can perhaps better make sense of things when they’re less clear: Continue reading “Where We Think It Should Go”

Matthew Ladd’s poetry collection, The Book of Emblems, reminded me of a modern take on Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings. Larkin, perhaps an influence on Ladd’s work, is referred to in his poem “Imitation,” which begins “When I read Philip Larkin / and picture him mugging to Kingsley about WATCHING SCHOOL-GIRLS” and goes on to say, admiringly, “Larkin is such an unrepentant asshole / and for all that, still beautiful, // like an aging circus performer.” The author admires and identifies with Larkin in the difficulty of writing poetry, concluding “how impossible the accurate naming of things: / cathedrals, children, the blank self-regard of the bachelor.” Continue reading “The Book of Emblems”

Delicate, patient, and loving, Mary Troy’s novel Beauties offers what only good novels can: a world the reader can escape into. Set in the year 2000 in a seedy neighborhood in St. Louis, Beauties tells the story of two cousins who move in together. Bev, a woman born with severe physical disabilities (she is missing a leg and all but one of her fingers), has just opened a café and, in addition to cooking, is busy fending off a lawsuit from her previous job. Her cousin, Shelly, fresh from a divorce, moves in to help run the café. Soon, both women are handling all the drama life in an urban café can provide. Continue reading “Beauties”

Once upon a time there was a poetry book that re-imagined the popular fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood” in a modern context through more than 120 pages of Red Riding Hood poems divided into nine chapters. Most of the poems, with a few exceptions, were introduced by titles in the present tense announcing an act by Red Riding Hood or one of the other familiar characters from her story (“Red Riding Dreams of Another Winter,” “Red Riding Hood Ends Up with the Hunter”; “The Hunter Has His Say”). Continue reading “A New Red”

Bonnie Bolling’s collection In the Kingdom of the Sons, winner of the 2011 Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry selected by Tom Sleigh, is a sensual work from a distinctly female perspective, exploring topics of motherhood, sexuality and domesticity, and how these aspects of being a woman interplay. Continue reading “In the Kingdom of the Sons”

Ronald Wardall’s collection of poems Lightning’s Dance Floor examines the ordinary, what surrounds us everyday, and finds the extraordinary in it. In “Necessity,” the author sets the poem in his “blue-bright child-memory.” Among the details of the train on “the Nebraska track like spaghetti,” “the star-struck window,” and “tell-tale neighbors,” he finds, as a child, that “like my father, my soul / was willing.” “Seeking the Minotaur” works as a type of thesis for the poems, setting the author in the detailed landscape of New York in “immutable / November.” The author “summon[s] up ambition enough to map / the waves” and to “practice prying apart / my ribs with a tuning fork,” a metaphor for his undertaking to pull meaning from the simple everyday actions and objects around him. Continue reading “Lightning’s Dance Floor”

Animal Magnetism was the winner of The 2009 Pearl Poetry Prize, selected by Debra Marquart, who describes the book as having “great buoyancy” and a “stubborn clinging to life, to love, to human connections.” I agree wholeheartedly with Marquart’s judgment about what makes Animal Magnetism especially worthwhile reading: Continue reading “Animal Magnetism”

BlazeVOX’s tagline is “publisher of weird little books,” and The Paris Poems qualifies, beginning with the dedication: “This book is equally dedicated to my husband and traveling partner, my parents, Victor Hugo, and the French macaron.” But, who isn’t captivated by the allure of Paris? (“Always arrive in Paris / on a Sunday afternoon / the skeleton of this fastened city / will become your bones”). Who can forget that Paris has given us some of the most memorable of artistic characters, stories we can never relive or truly adequately duplicate? (“Paris can never be our poem / it belongs to / Gertrude Stein and Alice B. / Henry and Anaïs / the filaments of a million lights / totemic in the tourists’ eyes”). Who doesn’t know that Paris is fashion central? (“Admit / it was a little sadistic / that 249 mile jaunt from / farm country / into history / the soles of your shoes / diffusing the gold medallions of dawn,” from the poem about Louis Vuitton). Who doesn’t long for the patisseries of Paris? (“Pledging my loyalty / like an immigrant seeking citizenship / I drank a cup of chocolate chaud / in a dessert house / steps from where Marie Antoinette / lost her head.”)Who doesn’t believe that Paris is about romance? (“Paris makes you want a man / who understands how to wear a scarf”). Who doesn’t realize that Paris is overrated? (“Most people fly to Paris to see the Louvre / between you and me / Mona Lisa isn’t that pretty / really”). Who doesn’t wish for (nationless) salvation? Continue reading “The Paris Poems”

Although she has published two books prior, I’d never read Martha Silano’s work, but she’s earned a new fan in me after reading this, her latest volume. Chosen by Campbell McGrath for the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception definitely deserves such an honor. Buy it, and you’ll have a constantly surprising little treasure in your collection to return to often. Continue reading “The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception”

A lovely gallery of a book. The poet contextualizes his museum/art-inspired poems in a note at the end of the book. His mother, Juanita Rice Guecione and aunts, Dorothy and Irene Rice (Pereira) were visual artists and they, and museums, have long fueled his imagination. In fact, he cannot imagine his life, he says, without them. Poems in the collection were informed by artworks in The Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Chelsea Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Frick, art forgeries, artwork he has encountered in journals, and his mother’s paintings, among other works. Continue reading “Brushstrokes and Glances”

Emily Kendal Frey toys with the utmost minimalism in The Grief Performance. In the first section of the book, her poems strongly favor striking imagery over narrative with—at-times cryptic—snapshot poems consisting of very short lines and frequent line breaks. The images are nonetheless powerful, always expanding unconventionally on a telling title, including six pieces entitled “The End.” Death is, pertinently, the great equalizer in Frey’s poems: “Then you die / in the big wooden chest of glory / alone,” she writes in “Meditation on a Meditation of Frost” and “We’re all going / to the same place” in “The March.” Continue reading “The Grief Performance”

Lott’s chapbook of 16 poems, the majority of which appeared previously in a variety of journals (Texas Review, Mid-America Poetry Review, and Crazy Horse, among others), is the winner of The Ledge 2009 Chapbook Award. I happened to be reading Lott’s book while the debate over the “cleaning up”/“contemporizing” of Mark Twain’s language was being played out in the press (like most items in the “news,” any mention of it quickly disappeared), so I was particularly interested in the chapbook’s opening poem, “Passage,” with its description of a “Negro church”: Continue reading “The Patience of Horses”