Everett’s formally virtuosic latest collection (after The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke) interrogates the sonnet form as both a mode for thought and a vehicle for sonic inquiry and play. These sonnets resist pure logic or narrative, twisting and turning back on themselves to question their progression and temporality, as in such lines as “The thrill of it all, setting sail,/ years away, might as well deliver/ the letters ourselves upon return, icy letters/ soaked with, overwhelmed with blood.” In the first half of the collection, Everett structures his sonnets around the Italian model, seeming to relish the diagrammatic strictness of the 4-4-3-3 line stanza structure even as internal rhyme, caesura, and enjambment challenge the neatness of the form: “Tweedle Dee did what Tweedle did done,/ a dumb thing to do, it was agreed. Build a house/ of straw on Paradise Street for a pretty/ young damsel chanced for to meet.” The volume’s second half incorporates tempo instruction into its musical titles, allowing Everett to further contrast form and content, as in a poem with tempo instructions for “liveliness,” which begins with the dreary couplet “A dungeon, a pit,/ A pillow with no head.” Wry and epigrammatic, these poems inventively challenge and expand the possibilities of form. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

The potent and focused fourth collection from Espinoza (There Should Be Flowers) captures the danger, mental strain, and transcendence of a trans woman’s experience. The raucous opener, “Airport Ritual,” crystallizes the book’s rejection of normativity as a trans speaker goes through airport security. As she is pulled aside for a pat-down, her genitals explode through her clothes, becoming “an amorphous blob of cosmic energy” that absorbs the entire airport, then the city of Irvine, Calif. Espinoza addresses topics that are widely relatable to women, including the gut-wrenching fear of being accosted on the street and the worry that wearing makeup makes one complicit with the patriarchy. She also powerfully hits upon moments of joy, as when she describes having her name changed legally in court: “The man says Jennifer and/ it’s like suddenly I exist.” In an anthem responding to anti-trans internet rhetoric, she vows to “stay alive forever and suffer the fate of the sun and the heat death of the universe just to spite everyone.” “The Front Door” describes growing up in an abusive household with a haunting, surreal slant: “A hungry dog inside her sternum screams when it opens.// She knows he is coming inside.” At times devastating, at times chilling, this volume expresses an exhilarating defiance. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

This moving and influential narrative love story by 12th-century Muslim poet Ganjavi draws on historical characters from the seventh-century Iranian court. In the work’s first modern-verse English translation, Davis (Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz) brings the story of Khosrow, an Iranian prince, and Shirin, an Armenian princess, to life through highly lyrical rhymed couplets that weave in contemporary language. The introduction provides valuable contextual information for both general and specialist readers: “But for all his innovativeness, Nezami had not turned his back on the literary tradition he inherited; rather he transformed the tradition by combining elements within it that had hitherto existed more or less separately.” We hear Davis’s excellent ear for and skill with rhyme throughout: “The shining sun rose, and the head of night/ Was severed from day’s body by its light./ The night was like a raven, and the sun/ Its golden egg now morning had begun,/ Leaving the darkness as it rose on high/ Beneath the parrot-colored morning sky.” The tale is rich with nature imagery: “In winter a good fire is like a flower,/ Healing the heart with its reviving power./ From hand to hand a flagon was passed round/ Shaped like a rooster, with a fitting sound.” Davis’s energetic rendering ensures that Nezami’s important contribution to Persian literature will be appreciated by wider audiences. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 04/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

O’Neil’s ruminative fourth collection (after Rewilding) explores the triumphs and traumas of daily life. The author’s journey to Mississippi from the Northeast after the death of a partner is central, mixing with memory in the opening poem, “Autopsy”: “you looked at me like a stranger, already estranged from this life to the next./ This is not an elegy or an apology, the lungs taking in too much water—/ this is a memory coming up for air.” Reflections on present joys are laced with the heartache of the South’s brutal past. Much of the book is dedicated to the tragic story of Emmett Till, a young Black teen who was lynched in 1955. Place becomes a character: “At Mississippi’s crossroads,/ I’ve come to see what’s left,/ what’s remained unclaimed for decades: cypress, palmetto, tupelo, river birch./ To love the magnolia and lament the smell. This place is not finished with me.” In “On the Edge of a Field in Summer,” the speaker remarks: “I break off a branch/ to feel trauma in my hands—a reminder that I have risked so little to be here,/ not even the shirt off my back.” These poems memorably navigate the braiding of love, tragedy, resilience, and parenthood. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 04/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

The attentive and intelligent eighth book from Cohen (Everything) charts childhood, loneliness, and existential unease with the poet’s trademark mix of philosophical clarity and surprise. In “Purchase,” the speaker finds a wallet belonging to a stranger: “You/ have a dental appointment/ in six days. Don’t/ miss it.” Reflecting on her departure from a job at “Tollbooths of America,” the speaker proclaims: “I preferred the short-term pain/ of leaving to the long-term injury/ of staying in one place” and “Do you think about how you’ll feel/ when you get where you’re/ headed? I never think about a place/ until I’ve left it.” Standouts include “Mercurial”: “We were bored/ to tears, breaking// thermometers open,/ letting the silver//drops spill and scatter and/ reassemble in our hands.// We didn’t understand/ how dangerous that was—// our hands, I mean, meaning// to hold anything.” That sentiment is echoed in the equally memorable “Something,” in which the speaker’s call to an automated machine service turns existential: “I’m sorry,/ the machine says. I’m/ having trouble understanding./ Did you miss today’s paper?/ Yes, I say, but that’s not/ the half of it. Sometimes/ I just feel like half/ of me, and even that/ feels like too much.” Though several of these poems feel uncharacteristically slight in their embracing of brevity, any new collection from Cohen is a gift. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

The inventive, philosophical, and verbally playful third collection from McFadzean (Drolleries) invites readers to the altar of her language. Here, truth emerges not as a statement of fact, but as a dynamic process of embracing life on life’s terms. “Kissing the Abyss” begins in the proverbial garden, with “the stench of fallen apples,” and ends by riffing on the motif: “Each breath a bonfire// Stick a pitchfork in me Heaven-scent.” In the title entry, crying is the crossroads between joy and destiny when the speaker is given a dress that symbolizes “love as action/ The movement of a body in space geometric.” McFadzean demonstrates a keen interest in mapping the process of embracing that which is alive, “a landscape like Iceland/ The sound flowers make: their tiny roots amplified.” In “Go Sit in the White Hot,” lovers cherish “each fragment clasped to our clavicles, tight,” and in “Out-of-Body Experiment,” the “subconscious performs/ a ritual to banish the darkness.” Yet the darkness in these poems is formidable: myths colliding with internet algorithms and teenagers cutting themselves to make deep scars. Despite these dangers, McFadzean suggests that light remains the best disinfectant. These incantatory poems are “in the shape of a star,” lighting the way, even though “there was a time we could have gone back but that time has passed.” (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

Mitchell (Beowulf) beautifully translates Catullus (84–54 BCE), retaining the original poems’ hendecasyllabic form while lending a punchy, plucky voice to the ancient poet. Mitchell explains his criteria for selecting which poems to translate: “I simply chose the poems that gave me the most pleasure—the ones I thought were the best.” Catullus writes of love affairs and the death of a brother, and issues juicy invectives against other poets that are on par with the best diss tracks. In one, he addresses a poet’s collection directly: “Hey, Volusius’ Annals (yes,/ I’m talking to your hundreds of pages smeared with bullshit).” In another, he asks, “What mean thing have I said or done to you, to/ make you plague me with all these putrid poets?” Catullus is best known for his poems about a woman he addresses as Lesbia, and their relationship reveals kaleidoscopic emotions: “Hate and love. Perhaps you are wondering how this can be. I don’t know, but I feel it and am in torment.” Elsewhere, he likens his heartbreak to illness, beseeching the gods to “take this disease and rip it out, this affliction.” Catullus’s verses still ring true, reminding readers that the habits of the heart haven’t changed in millennia. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

The powerful sixth book from Metres (Shrapnel Maps), who is of Lebanese descent, confronts the trials of the present moment—including forced migration, climate change, and nationalism—through his family’s migration story. Metres wields poetic forms (among them odes, sonnets, and prayers) to explore themes of loss and resilience. The volume is arranged around the qasida, an ancient Arabic poetic form consisting of three sections: naṣīb (fate), raḥīl (exile), and fakhr (honor or praise). With lyrical mastery, Metres riffs on the famous sonnet by Emma Lazarus found on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” His tonal equivalent contrasts the original with the cry of a “migrant woman” who scrounges for anything that “might fill her children’s insides”: “We’ve hidden in swarms/ To escape the dread masters of horror...Welcome us, the deplored./ We stand at the landing of your golden dorm” (“The New New Colossus”). Metres reflects on those “who live their last years/ where they’ve always lived—/ in another country” in poems that transcend time and place, language and silence, honoring the enduring spirit of those who journey in search of refuge. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this sunny debut collection, Sullivan traces a lifelong journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance with deceptive depth. The poems capture relatable small pleasures of life and a spirit of resilience, as she recalls facing such challenges as a bad marriage, and acts of bravery, such as her relocation to Portland, Ore., for a new start. The most troubling parts of life provide an opportunity to seize the day: “Look, America is awful and the earth is too hot and the truth of/ the matter is we’re all up against the clock. It makes everything/ simple and urgent: there’s only time to turn toward what you truly/ love.” While romantic love can be a destructive force, there are always opportunities to live and love again: “Is there a way to love and not die? I’m not sure but the Alaskan/ wood frog freezes solid in winter only to blast back in spring.” There are a fair number of pieces of less substance, but even many of these offer delightfully musical moments, as in “Remember What It Was Like to Be a Kid?” which begins, “All skinned knees,/ pavement and sick-sweet/ candy in the sticky backseat.” Sullivan’s unpretentious and blunt recounting of her experiences is a breath of fresh air. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

The bright and speculative latest from CAConrad (Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibration) delivers poems whose forms reflect their interest in organic processes: “A voice told me in a dream that my poems were now spirits of animals. I saw them moving across the page, looking for something to eat, investigating the edges of the paper where they found themselves trapped.” They rely on a (Soma)tic poetry ritual to build their poems, which undulate down the middle of the page, resembling mushrooms and sprouts with smooth edges that curve like shells or leaves. Foregoing punctuation, CAConrad’s writing requires a heightened focus, offering a gentle reminder to “retire the invisible/ arm reaching in and/ out of our attention.” These pieces respond to the need to stop mourning, the “need to fall in love again with the world as it is, not as it was.” It might be a stretch to say the collections is hopeful, but as the speaker asserts, “enough poems have been/ wasted on human cruelty/ we dig hard to/ find the/ other/ world.” There is still time, CAConrad suggests, to “learn how/ to live so/ wilderness/ never/ becomes/ mythology.” As the climate crisis intensifies, these affecting and imaginative poems offer readers a space to reflect on what still remains. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/19/2024 | Details & Permalink