Book Reviews

  • Humor and Grace in The Survival Expo by Caki Wilkinson reviewed by Barbara Murphy

    We know we are in for a wild ride just looking at the cover of Caki Wilkinson’s daring third book
    Issue #136 December 2022
  • THE SOUND BOAT by Judith Vollmer reviewed by Linda Johnston Muhlhausen

    What’s the poor reviewer to do, faced with trying to do justice to a volume of poetry as gastronomically and symphonically generous as Judith Vollmer’s The Sound Boat?
    Issue #135 November 2022
  • The Gospel of Wildflowers and Weeds by Orlando Ricardo Menes reviewed by Andrea Read

    A World Graced by Disorder: Orlando Ricardo Menes’s The Gospel of Wildflowers and Weeds “I will not desist in finding God, mine & yours…”   From the dry puna winds of his childhood Lima to a first glorious rainfall – aguacero tropical – in Miami; from muck-and-slush puddle, river, and ocean to that “obstinate life in the ocean” of the

    Issue #134 October 2022
  • Timothy Liu reviews new books from Lynn Xu and Michael Chang

    I’m a fan of well-printed books. Handmade. Letter press.
    Issue #133 September 2022
  • Jane Zwart reviews “Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking” by C.T. Salazar

    One of the great, disorienting pleasures of C.T. Salazar’s first full-length collection of poems is how little level ground it contains.
    Issue #132 August 2022
  • David Baker’s “Whale Fall” reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar

    If in W.S. Merwin’s “For a Coming Extinction” the whales are on their way “to The End,”
    Issue #131 July 2022
  • Lesley Wheeler’s “Poetry’s Possible Worlds” reviewed by Jane Zwart

    In poetry and prose, Lesley Wheeler contends, “the ratio of sound to sense is different.”
    Issue #130 June 2022
  • distant transit by Maya Haderlap reviewed by Mark Wagenaar

    “…is there a zone of darkness between all language, / a black river that swallows words / and stories and transforms them?”
    Issue #129 May 2022
  • Adam Vines’ “Lures” reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar

    If you read all of Adam Vines’s new collection, "Lures", and at the end of the book close your eyes and try to picture in your mind’s eye the book’s signature image
    Issue #128 April 2022
  • Brian Culhane’s “Remembering Lethe” reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar

    Brian Culhane’s Remembering Lethe is remarkably, refreshingly cohesive.
    Issue #127 March 2022
  • Zeeshan Khan Pathan’s “The Minister of Disturbances” and Allison Joseph’s “Lexicon” reviewed by Mark Wagenaar

    The poems in The Minister of Disturbances have a wide variety of settings, and jump around the globe
    Issue #126 February 2022
  • Carmine Starnino’s ‘Dirty Words’ reviewed by Mark Wagenaar

    For this month’s installment, I thought I’d wander a little farther afield—a little farther north
    Issue #125 January 2022