NewPages Blog :: Books

The reader will either become addicted to or lack the commitment needed for Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels starting with My Brilliant Friend (331 pages), followed by The Story of a New Name (471 pages) and this latest third volume Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. The final fourth volume will come out September 2015. The length of the novels and the character-driven, rather than plot-driven, story might discourage some readers. Continue reading “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay”

It’s the rare book that will compel me to read it aloud rather than silently, and reading The Blue Box by Ron Carlson turned out to be one of those experiences. Flash fiction is a genre that can so easily become pretentious or overly complicated. To fit a distinct narrative voice in such a short span of time while also enticing the readers with an intriguing plot, humor, and depth is no easy feat, but Carlson seems to accomplish it all with little more than a snap of his fingers. Though the circumstances in the stories were often surreal, the voice felt cemented in a witty hyper-reality. Continue reading “The Blue Box”

Reckoning by Rusty Barnes is the story of a Richard Logan, a fourteen-year-old boy in a small Appalachian town. Richard and Katie, the pretty new girl in town, find an unconscious woman in a lake one day while swimming. This woman, Misty, along with Katie’s mother and Lyle, Richard’s adult nemesis, lead the way down a path into debauchery and violence in their wooded hamlet. In the description on the back of the book, it is called “brutal and beautiful” which is true in parts. The brutality is clearly used as a selling point, unsurprising when shows like Breaking Bad and True Detective are being celebrated Continue reading “Reckoning”

How does a poet who perceives the depth of trouble humans have sunk themselves and other living species in convey the confusion and range—the tumultuous feeling—of this trouble? The long poem by Betsy Andrews titled The Bottom swims right into these waters with a voice that jumps from clear-eyed anger to imaginative wonder as it catalogues and presses close to “the sea’s delicious mess.” This is a relentless swimming, tense with music, urgent in its journey toward a sense of safety and home. Continue reading “The Bottom”

Flipping a page in Julia Elliott’s short story collection The Wilds is opening a page upon whole new futuristic worlds that do not stray that far from our own. On one page you’ll enter a spa for “bodily restoration” with goat-milk-and-basil soaks, kelp baths, and lunches of raw vegetables and fermented organ meats. Turn the page and you’ll enter a scientist’s lab where a sexless robot falls in love. Further in still, you’ll discover a disease that feeds on teenagers, causing them to obsess over videogames or social-networking sites and to have a social withdrawal and “a voracious appetite for junk food.”

Continue reading “The Wilds”

Stephen Twilley’s new translation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s last work The Professor and the Siren would appeal most to those who loved di Lampedusa’s masterpiece The Leopard, as both are beautifully written. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa witnessed the demise of his aristocratic family’s holdings in Sicily after the rise of Garibaldi and the subsequent unification of Italy. The Leopard’s story traces the aristocracy’s downfall in the person of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, known as “the Leopard.” Continue reading “The Professor and The Siren”

The Family Cannon is Halina Duraj’s debut short story collection on family, loyalty, and fidelity. The collection of ten stories revolve around Magda, a 20-something woman (perhaps modeled after the writer herself?) and her immigrant parents from Poland who survived the Nazis and WWII. The father immigrates to the United States after the war and, in a few years’ time, visits his birth country to find a wife. The stories do not follow a narrowly defined linear trajectory; Continue reading “The Family Cannon”

Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 is the first compilation of Hoa Nguyen’s work, gathering several of her previous small press chapbooks, including Red Juice from effing press, Your Ancient See Through from subpress, and Hecate Lochia from Hot Whiskey Press. Arranged chronologically, the book demonstrates the progressive development of some of Nguyen’s key interests—including the contradictions of popular culture; the visceral nature of childbirth, mothering, and womanhood; and a clashing sense of both culpability in and removal from impending environmental collapse.

Continue reading “Red Juice”

The “moment” in Robert Sitton’s Lady in the Dark: Iris Barry and the Art of Film does not involve Ms. Barry. Over a series of formal meetings and parties, several millionaires (Nelson Rockefeller and Jock Whitney) and their talented, educated friends (architect Philip Johnson and the wealthy painter Gerald Murphy) decided to create The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). That they accomplished this during the Great Depression is miraculous. They knew society—not the types in nightclubs or their equivalent to the red carpet—could not survive without culture.

Continue reading “Lady in the Dark”

The Unsung Masters Series published by Pleiades Press performs a remarkable service to writers whose work has been eclipsed for one reason or another during the ensuing decades after its original appearance. Each volume focuses upon a writer relatively unknown, providing a relatively quick, yet nonetheless detailed, summation of his or her biography along with some critical overview and examples of the work itself. Francis Jammes (1868-1938) was a major presence in the French literary scene of his day. He also received significant attention from English readers. Continue reading “Francis Jammes”

William Logan’s poetry reviews found in Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure don’t mince words. Never drab, his criticism will entertain and never bore. It doesn’t much matter whether readers agree or disagree with his judgments, as he generally delivers them with enough original panache to readily amuse all the same. He doesn’t quite reach far enough out from the borders of the poetry world to be of interest to those readers unfamiliar with poetry-at-large, but anyone with a decent background in the field, whether reading for a degree or for pleasure, will be quite well acquainted enough to follow along. Continue reading “Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure”

John Skoyles, poetry editor of Ploughshares and professor at Emerson College, unveils in this memoir his journey as the son of a working class family in Queens whose mother introduces him to poetry, to student at a Jesuit all-male college, to the Iowa Writers Workshop, Provincetown, Yaddo, and a long, successful career as professor and published writer. He takes the reader along through his interactions with intimidating professors, competitive classmates, indifferent women, and flawed mentors. He skillfully weaves the diverse elements Continue reading “A Moveable Famine”

Shane McCrae in Nonfiction, a collection of poems, urgently requires readers to face both the visible and invisible truths of our American culture and society, present and past. Throughout these poems, the lyric voice of our culture and its various speakers emit a language that insistently stammers and stutters, resulting in poems that stun readers with pure lyrical beauty. The rhythm of the line, the stutter and repetition, so closely mimics the messy, rarely perfect, inner dialogues of the soul. Continue reading “Nonfiction”

For fans, baseball is poetry in motion. One team that continues to demonstrate grace is the Los Angeles Dodgers. Love or hate them, the team of Jackie Robinson and Sandy Koufax who has Magic Johnson among its co-ownership are still captivating, starting with manager Don Mattingly. As a Yankee in the 1980’s, “Donnie Baseball” and Keith Hernandez, his equal, opposite number on the New York Mets, gave daily clinics on the art of playing first base. No line drive or off-balance throw was too impossible for either of them. Continue reading “Heart of the Order”

I usually start a book review with some information on the author, including past publications, academic affiliations and other markers of importance that might help the reader slot the work into whatever framework he or she has for deciding what books are worth reading. While CAConrad definitely has the required pedigree, detailing it seems counter to the ethos of the book’s rejection of received knowledge in favor of lived experience.

Continue reading “Ecodeviance”

Elise Cowen is a name unlikely to ring a bell for any readers unfamiliar with the now rather legendary American literary phenomenon of the Beat Generation. Yet her writing will likely intrigue and warrant interest to a readership well beyond that demographic. Cowen’s brief life (1933-1962) proves rather remarkable for a young, unmarried woman of the era: she freely and openly explored her sexuality with multiple lovers of both sexes, including Allen Ginsberg, with whom she appears to have formed a deeper attachment, likely unreturned in kind; spent time living in both New York City and San Francisco, establishing relationships and friendships with artist communities in both cities; experimented habitually with drugs and alcohol; and dedicated herself to the pursuit of a poetic, intellectual life as much as possible all the while. Continue reading “Elise Cowen”

One gets the feeling that she is always stuck in a hallway, or a “corridor.” But a corridor is not only a way of connecting rooms or railway cars; it also serves as link between two lands, and as a migratory path for birds. Continue reading “Corridor”

Joseph P. Wood’s most recent poetry collection, Broken Cage, is a short book that takes ideas of symmetry and formal constraint to the extreme. Broken into three sections, the poems grow longer as the book progresses, and then shorter again in the third section. Wood focuses most of his energy on the triolet, an eight-line French form that includes rhyming as well as repeated lines.

Continue reading “Broken Cage”

Smart, funny, tender, and always sharp with language, Joanne Diaz’s new book of poems My Favorite Tyrants is both elegy and celebration of those tyrants—cultural, historical, mythical, and personal—that shape our understanding of our current selves and the world we’ve produced. Divided into three sections, “The Perimeter of Pleasure,” “Elegy,” and “Metastasis,” the occasion for these poems is centered around the sudden and tragic loss of the speaker’s mother, a mother while dearly loved and respected, was perhaps, in her own way, a bit of a (shall I say it?) tyrant. Continue reading “My Favorite Tyrants”

Confessions of a Book Burner is award-winning poet and children’s book writer Lucha Corpi’s latest collection of personal essays and stories of growing up in a large family in Mexico and pursuing her passion for the written word. These twelve essays delve into childhood memories, cultural heritage, family, love, and the craft of writing. The essays explore Corpi’s Chicana heritage and offer a nuanced look at the intimate histories of Mexican Americans and their struggles straddling two cultures. Continue reading “Confessions of a Book Burner”

“Let me explain. I hunt for twins,” says Jack Gorse, narrator of Pamela Erens’s The Understory. “Not your run-of-the-mill fraternals, your IVF side effects, but identicals only, life’s natural aberrations. Nothing so far but Nature can make those mirror images, her rare gift of likeness in the world of infinite variety.” Originally published in 2007 by Ironweed Press and reissued this past April by Tin House Books, The Understory is a book about doubles, a search for second selves and other halves. It is about what it feels like to be alone and the lengths we will go to in order to find completion. Continue reading “The Understory”

What is this life all about? That type of philosophical query may seem an unlikely undercurrent to a book of poems ostensibly focused on a writer’s experience of a specific place. Yet, when read as a whole, the direct, lyrical poems in Arleen Paré’s Lake of Two Mountains, weave a wide web of overlapping stories and impressions that casts a deep sense of wonder on the nature of particularity. Continue reading “Lake of Two Mountains”

The reader has a lot of work to do after entering Divya Victor’s piece of expression, Things To Do With Your Mouth. The writing is a hybrid of text, speech, and performance. The body, the vocal cords, the mouth. This is about who can speak and be heard and who cannot, about who has power in the system and who does not, and we experience this from the side of those who are not heard and who do not have power in the system. Continue reading “Things To Do With Your Mouth”

Among modern day Iranians (i.e. Persians) the world-over, the poet Hafez (1315/17-1389/90) remains a household name. His “Divan” (Persian for “Collected Poems”) is found in nearly every household. Every Persian New Year, it is brought out, opened at random, and read from as a means of divination “interpreting what is found there” for what’s to come the following year. Continue reading “Hafez”

Agency is the capacity of an individual to choose and change, a theme that quickly emerges in From a Tilted Pail, Ajay Vishwanathan’s debut collection of short stories. The settings for all seven stories are the villages, shanty towns and interstices of rural India—not, at first, the obvious choice for exemplifying human agency. But, in fact, the stories deal with everyday people, the forgotten ones, the almost forgotten, the maimed, powerless and the despairing. Until, that is, Vishwanathan attends to them with his beautifully crafted prose and coaxes out their voices, narratives, histories and through it all, a sense of agency, in almost poetic form and with an acute appreciation and empathy for lived realities in India. Continue reading “From a Tilted Pail”

Hemingway’s literary world is nothing if not well-studied. Between 1917 -1929, Ernest Hemingway’s early adult years are marked with journalism, war, marriage, expatriation, and his own struggles as a writer attempting to make inroads into the growing scene of European literati. Where most scholarly work has focused on Hemingway’s personal journey in his literary career, the surrounding contexts of his work are less emphasized. In War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life and Writings, editors Steve Paul, Gail Sinclair, and Steven Trout focus on the social and cultural histories of Hemingway’s early work, highlighting detail from a swarm of Hemingway scholars. Continue reading “War + Ink”

In Ellen Kaufman’s House Music, the reader is invited to come in, have a seat, and get comfortable. There are no grandiose declarations or flighty vagaries to spin the reader off into the cosmos; Kaufman’s use of plain, honest verse and precise language establishes order and a warm sense of familiarity to her subjects and places. Kaufman treats us to her company and wit without imposition, as the readers become guests beneath the roof of her memories and imagination. Continue reading “House Music”

The Stories of Jane Gardam will delight Gardam’s fans, who may find something new here. Unlike Gardam’s most famous novel Old Filth, but not unlike the ending of the third book in her trilogy Last Friends, these stories explore what may not be real. They also hold the element of mystery, fantasy, and surprise endings. Spanning from 1977 to 2007, these stories give a broader overview of Gardam’s talents, her favorite themes very visible. Continue reading “The Stories of Jane Gardam”

“The Day,” the first poem Anthony McCann’s latest poetry collection, Thing Music, from Wave Books, begins:

In this coupling
     of speech
  where everything
begins     where
shimmering
began
    please Continue reading “Thing Music”

The title of this debut novel by Wendy Jones, The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price Purveyor of Superior Funerals, suggests a fun, light, old-fashioned read, which it partly is. But it also deals with serious, timeless subjects, though the resolution reflects the time wherein the novel takes place: 1924, in the small Welsh town of Narberth. Continue reading “The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price Purveyor of Superior Funerals”

Termination Dust is the fitting title of Susanna J. Mishler’s first collection of poems. As this Alaska-based poet describes in a poem, “termination dust” is the name locals use for the first snowfall in autumn: it names the meeting point between seasons, and suggests an essential ending and beginning. Moments of such meeting-grounds—between humans, between the human and the wild—are key elements throughout the wide-ranging poems of this striking collection. Continue reading “Termination Dust”

The first biography since her death in 2004, Susan Sontag: A Biography by Daniel Schreiber, gives a straightforward account of a very complex life. Sontag graduated high school at fifteen, married at seventeen, earned a BA from the University of Chicago at eighteen, had a son at nineteen, and was divorced at twenty-five. Sontag left the academic world, not completing a doctorate, as she explained, in order to explore the world intellectually on her own terms. She was a novelist, cultural critic, filmmaker, stage director, playwright, and political activist. She became an international pop icon and intellectual celebrity. She wrote about photography, illness, human rights, AIDS, media, minority rights, and liberal politics. When doctors told her twice she had cancers that were rarely survivable, she survived by her own efforts to find new treatments. Continue reading “Susan Sontag”

After reading the title, I had a feeling that The Deportation of Wopper Barraza would be about someone named Wopper Barraza who, for some reason, was deported from the United States. (Clearly, astute powers of deduction were at work.) However, after the first few chapters, I wasn’t sure whether or not we would be following Wopper or if he would be a symbolic figure since the early chapters aren’t actually told from Wopper’s perspective. What soon became clear was that the narrative structure of the novel was going to be an experimental, often playful, journey through the minds of people affected by Wopper’s deportation, including, at times, Wopper, himself. What I originally thought could be a clunky narrative style quickly proved to be a delightful, multi-dimensional foray into the immigration experience from both sides of the Mexican-American border. Continue reading “The Deportation of Wopper Barraza”

Bad Things never choose their location. A storm’s path is traceable but its final destination can be wider and more destructive than projected. Earthquakes, tsunamis and twisters strike without warning.

Humans cause Bad Things too. The real-life event that connects the stories in Bonnie ZoBell’s unsettling What Happened Here is the kind of Bad Thing that receives attention when it occurs, on anniversaries, and when something equally terrible happens. In 1978, Pacific Southwest Flight 182 collided with a private Cessna plane over the San Diego neighborhood of North Park. The Cessna’s pilot failed to inform air traffic control of their course change, the other pilot was unable to see the other plane on the radar, and air traffic control ignored the alarm that the planes were heading toward each other. The result: 137 people from both planes were killed, seven died on the ground with nine more injured and 22 homes destroyed. It remains the deadliest air disaster in California history. Continue reading “What Happened Here”

There are a few things that make A Moody Fellow Finds Love and Then Dies feel like a modern fairytale: its decidedly lyrical verse, the pithy unseen narrators, and the fanciful notions of people dropping dead upon seeing one of the most beautiful women to ever live. The structure of the novel, however, is what lends the book most to this form. As is common with fairytales, perhaps because they seem to follow a particular formula, the reader knows, more or less, what is going to happen before it even begins. A moody fellow, who is moody and whose name is actually Moody Fellow, does indeed find love and then die. Moody begins as someone with a rather naïve impression of love: “One thing Moody was sure of, though, from books: love always brought out the best in people. Poor Moody. He really wasn’t cut out for the world as we know it.” Continue reading “A Moody Fellow Finds Love and Then Dies”

Writing history is hard. Writing good history? Even harder.

Writing good history implies a fair treatment of one’s source materials, a readability of the narrative, and a clear voice. Juggling these three demands is difficult, to say the least. Writing history involves understanding the trade-offs between these three components. Different types of histories show different balances, and when one component is weighed over another, a different type a history emerges. Academic histories tend to favor attention to source material and detailed footnotes. Popular histories rely on readability. Memoir-infused histories blend present and past as the author’s own connections frame how stories are told. Even when given the same set of events, there are many ways to write about those events and many ways to write it well. Refusing to pick a specific frame, however, leaves loose threads in the historical narrative—threads that snarl and knot, distracting the reader from the author’s purpose. Continue reading “Coolie Woman”

Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat is nothing like the usual cat book. Takashi Hiraide is an acclaimed poet in Japan, and this novel resembles a poem, recreating the immense world in small images, opening up to life with love and loss. It’s short like a poem, but though nostalgic and moving, it is not sentimental. The end of The Guest Cat indicates this novel evolved as a reshaping of a collection of essays and journal notes about the narrator and his wife’s relationship with a neighborhood cat Chibi, meaning “little one” in Japanese. This is a quiet, reflective, even philosophical book, which can appeal to more than cat lovers, since it is about how a relationship can change a person, how a communal animal can make one question who owns the animal, and how loss can reveal not just grief but resentment. By the end of The Guest Cat, the narrator notices and loves more, even extending his love to a house he doesn’t own. Continue reading “The Guest Cat”

Writing history is hard. Writing good history? Even harder.

Writing good history implies a fair treatment of one’s source materials, a readability of the narrative, and a clear voice. Juggling these three demands is difficult, to say the least. Writing history involves understanding the trade-offs between these three components. Different types of histories show different balances, and when one component is weighed over another, a different type a history emerges. Academic histories tend to favor attention to source material and detailed footnotes. Popular histories rely on readability. Memoir-infused histories blend present and past as the author’s own connections frame how stories are told. Even when given the same set of events, there are many ways to write about those events and many ways to write it well. Refusing to pick a specific frame, however, leaves loose threads in the historical narrative—threads that snarl and knot, distracting the reader from the author’s purpose. Continue reading “Coolie Woman”

Four lines into the opening poem “The Bread” from Jeffrey Bean’s award-winning new chapbook Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, the speaker recounts the defining experience of his life: sitting down at a restaurant table with a girl. Doling out description with subtle music that captures the slowly evolving intimacy of the situation, the stanza quite literally sets the table for the flash of love’s bittersweet onset that occurs in the stanza’s final line. While the straightforward description of the scene details the outward circumstance of the meeting, the allusion to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “God’s Grandeur” captures the true scope of the meeting’s importance:

The bread, the salad, simple, oiled.
The coats on hooks, exhaling winter smoke.
The hand that was mine, the knuckles, the table, smooth oak.
The girl I’d come to meet, the sky behind her hair, shook foil.

Continue reading “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window”

There are 1.2 billion Indians today, and the fertility rate for an Indian woman of childbearing age is 2.59. So, Indians must be having a lot of sex. Ah, but if only sex were all about copulation. How can India produce the Kama Sutra, venerate literal reproductions of the phallus, and yet, as a society, hold seemingly regressive attitudes about sex and women’s sexuality? In The Kama Sutra Diaries: Intimate Journeys through Modern India, British journalist and freelance writer Sally Howard asks this question that has been previously expounded upon by historians, academics and hippies hibernating in Goa. What she brings to this debate is a fresh perspective, new voices and a judgment-free approach to 21st century India’s attitudes about sex, sexuality, women’s lib, kink, sex work, and romantic love. Continue reading “The Kama Sutra Diaries”

The ten stories that make up Rivka Galchen’s American Innovations are compelling and unsettling, and feature female protagonists who are themselves unsettled. Some are predictably unsettled by men, husbands and love interests while others are entirely misfit within their lives, within their worlds. Many of the characters are reeling from a recent loss—of a job, or a relationship, or of innocence itself. Continue reading “American Innovations”

Amid the ever-increasing number of short-form anthologies, Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms attempts to distinguish itself through comprehensiveness. As the unwieldy subtitle demonstrates, all genres, modes, centuries, and nationalities are fair game and the only limitation is that the piece be “fewer than 1250 words.” Continue reading “Short”

Laressa Dickey’s first full-length collection, Bottomland, portrays a familiar American landscape with a deeply private undercurrent. Pastoral images and their inhabitants play a central role in the journey, but they keep their secrets. Continue reading “Bottomland”

Robert Root begins Happenstance by explaining his plan for the memoir: “to write about one hundred days of my childhood in the next one hundred days of my age, to capture one hundred recollections of the past over one hundred days of the future.” On the eleventh day, however, his father died, and Root shelved the project for four years, until one of his creative writing students told the story about the chance meeting of his parents, prompted by a fly ball at a summer softball game. Haunted by the realization that numerous instances of happenstance had conspired to create this event, Root resumed researching family records, photo albums, and items he identifies as “literary remains.” The result is not so much a nonfiction narrative, as he writes in a guest blog post on Michael J. Steinberg’s site, but “the prose equivalent of a medieval polyptych, a multi-paneled altarpiece, especially since it is also full of photographs.” Continue reading “Happenstance”

Some narrative poetry unfolds with loops of discursive detail, painting moments or scenes with long sighs of description. Not Beverly Burch’s work: these narratives hum with an electric attention to words. Poem after poem in How a Mirage Works centers on the kind of ‘mirages’ familiar to any of us, such as memory or our changing identities in life. Yet even when imbued with melancholy, the pace and language of these poems create worlds that crackle with a surprising suspense. Continue reading “How a Mirage Works”

After discovering she is pregnant, the most famous mother in Greek mythology prophetically admits being “scared.” In Richard Matturro’s inevitable and absorbing Medea, she has every reason to be. Her troubles began long before the births—and deaths—of her twin sons. The Princess of Colchis (located in the Caucasus Mountains on the eastern edge of the Black Sea) is a practicing witch who lost everything helping her future husband Jason steal the Golden Fleece from her father King Aeëtes.
Continue reading “Medea”

Phoning Home is a collection of essays by Jacob Appel, a prolific writer whose achievements in other disciplines such as medicine and bioethics provide him with a distinctive writer’s voice and acuity. The essays span the writer’s professional and personal lives, each adding depth and perception to the other. Essays on Appel’s Jewish heritage and family are at once poignant, witty and insightful. In “Mr. Odd and Mr. Even,” Appel profiles his maternal and paternal grandfathers, both in many ways polar opposites—one, a conformist and the other, someone who “made a point of sticking his neck out as far as his tiny, rounded shoulders would permit.” Who he should take after, Appel wonders. The rule breaker or the follower? In presenting their life stories in parallel, Appel marvels over the pull and push of familial bonds that mold us into who we are today. Continue reading “Phoning Home”

The loaded title of Bianca Stone’s debut collection, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, carries the weight of the marriage-industrial complex on its shoulders. The modern wedding is a complex maze of consumerism, family tradition, and DIY design. But this book isn’t about weddings or bridesmaids. It’s about lovers discovering the space of a long-term relationship, and the poems vibrate when they touch on the tension between self-love and love for another self. Continue reading “Someone Else’s Wedding Vows”

Why We Make Gardens, Jeanne Larsen’s second book of poetry, is divided into five sections: “Elementals,” “Generations,” “That Green Expiring Close,” “Annihilating All That’s Made,” and “Pleasance.” Each poem incorporates the word “garden” in the title in some way—some are more metaphysical, such as “Garden of Bitterness,” and some are more literal, such as “Garden After Winter’s First Storm.” The book is unified through this theme of gardens, yet Larsen’s finely tuned sensibilities never allow the poems to fall into redundancy. Continue reading “Why We Make Gardens”

Adamantine is not what it announces itself to be. By which, I mean adamantine (impenetrable as rock). Compact, solid, polished, focused in on itself, grounded as rock, yes. Continue reading “Adamantine”