News & Reviews

Date: November 30, 2022

Diane Thiel’s third collection of poetry, Questions from Outer Space, comes after an interlude during which the poet devoted her energies to a travel memoir (The White Horse) and the translation of contemporary Greek fiction. Her first two collections (Echolocations and Resistance Fantasies) garnered acclaim, including the Nicholas Roerich Award, for their intelligence, wit, wordplay, and attention to […]

Date: November 30, 2022

The evolution of blank verse from Milton to Wordsworth, via Cowper, was not solely a change in diction and subject matter. Even as classical and biblical themes were displaced by a sense of personal mythos—and even while plain speech triumphed over grammatical inversions—so, too, was there a recalibration of meter. At least as riveting as […]

Date: November 21, 2022

A POET KNOWN for his narratives, like Ludlow, the acclaimed historical-novel-in-verse turned opera, David Mason curates the archipelago of intensely satisfying lyric poems in Pacific Light with the skill of a consummate storyteller. His imaginative sweep is evident in “The Air in Tasmania,” set in his adopted home of Australia, where “the land / takes flying lessons from […]

Date: November 21, 2022

Koertge inhabits – and endows – his various subjects with insight and humour, dealing out poems in the voices of car crash dummies, Aphrodite, Mickey Mouse, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Bride of Frankenstein, among others. All this sounds as if the collection is a laugh-a-minute, superficial thing. It’s not. It is funny, yes, […]

Date: November 17, 2022

A simultaneously elegant and sharp-edged exploration of the hidden past. “I am haunted by gaps in family memories, nebulous responses and twisted behavior that must be examined within the context of history—not to uncover excuses but rather reveal family baggage we all must carry and learn to live with,” writes Masumoto near the beginning of […]

Date: November 17, 2022

A mordantly tender triumph rich with natural imagery. Uschuk’s poetry collection calls out authoritarianism and social injustice. This moving set of poems offer messages of hope as it addresses timely issues. It’s divided into four sections—“Skull Song,” “Axis,” “Liquid Book of the Dead,” and “Speaking of Angels and Ghosts”—and deals with a broad spectrum of […]

Date: November 16, 2022

“Paired with artist Patricia Wakida’s haunting illustrations, the book’s rich, lyrical language evokes both cultural eloquence and California’s seasonal beauty. Poignant and reflective, Secret Harvests is a family saga of quiet endurance and bittersweet triumphs.” — Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews

Date: November 14, 2022

The title of your book Your Nostalgia is Killing Me, seems to be an ironic one. The protagonist’s nostalgia is seemingly running havoc on his own life. He can’t escape revisiting the past and all the losses he has incurred: losses in love, familial losses, and the loss wrought by the AIDS epidemic.

Date: November 9, 2022

Though Marybeth Holleman is the author of several nonfiction books centering around environmental issues and her chosen home of Alaska, tender gravity is her debut collection of poetry. Its title is drawn from its opening poem, “The Beating Heart, Minus Gravity,” wherein the speaker experiences a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, of “diving / to the blue […]

Date: November 9, 2022

Dead Can Dance have long been a deeply resonant, exploratory presence on the outskirts of alternative music. Never comfortably existing in one genre or another – no surprises there, given their incomparably wide range of musical influences – they have nonetheless formed a kind of breathing and thinking space for an array of punks, goths […]