Book Reviews

  • 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
  • Devon Walker-Figueroa’s Philomath reviewed by Jeri Theriault

    Philomath by Devon Walker-Figueroa Milkweed Editions paperback 104 pages ISBN: 978-1-57131-522-9       The poems in Philomath, Devon Walker-Figueroa’s 2021 National Poetry Series collection, evoke her origins in western Oregon, a landscape suggested in the cover art by Erik Larson, a stark woodcut of tree rings on a decayed stump. As she revisits the farmlands and vineyards of King’s

    Plume Issue #124 December 2021
  • Kasey Jueds’s “The Thicket” reviewed by Jane Zwart

    “The thicket / swells with secrets,” Kasey Jueds writes in the poem “Unbidden,”
    Issue #123 November 2021
  • Sean Thomas Dougherty’s Not All Saints Reviewed by Sonia Greenfield

    Sean Thomas Dougherty’s Not All Saints, his thirteenth full-length collection
    Issue #122 October 2021
  • John Wall Barger’s “Resurrection Fail” reviewed by Cameron MacKenzie

    John Wall Barger Resurrection Fail. New York Spuyten Duyvil 2021. 100 pgs.   Director Michael Mann, when asked why he used digital cameras for his films, said that he preferred the technology because it enabled him to “see into the night.” It was the digital format, Mann insisted, that made the darkness feel most “alive.”   I am often reminded

    Issue #121 September 2021
  • Robert Alexander’s “Finding Token Creek” reviewed by Sonia Greenfield

    Finding Token Creek: New & Selected Writing, 1975-2020 Robert Alexander White Pine Press April 2021 ISBN: 978-1-945680-441   The Sacred and Mundane: A Review of Robert Alexander’s Finding Token Creek   If the title of Robert Alexander’s New and Selected, Finding Token Creek, reminds you at all of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, that would be apropos. Much as

    Issue #120 August 2021
  • Worldly Things by Michael Kleber-Diggs reviewed by Jane Zwart

    Review of Worldly Things. Michael Kleber-Diggs. Milkweed. June 8, 2021. $22.   Worldly Things is the name of Michael Kleber-Diggs’s first collection of poetry, and the phrase “worldly things” also gives one of the poems in the book its title. Preceding that poem, though, the writer shoulders the label himself. He writes:   Our moment here is small. I

    Issue #118 June 2021
  • The Hölderliniae by Nathaniel Tarn reviewed by Devin King

    My favorite book by Nathaniel Tarn was not written by Nathaniel Tarn.
    Issue #119 July 2021
  • Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar

    Valzhyna Mort’s Music for the Dead and Resurrected is unlike anything else I can remember reading for a long time.
    Issue #117 May 2021