PETITION by Joyce Peseroff reviewed by DeWitt Henry
Carnegie Mellon University Press 2020 $15.95 78pp. paper ISBN 978-0-88748-861-6 Joyce Peseroff has been a personal friend since she served as Ploughshares’s poetry editor and managing editor. Her first collection, The Hardness Scale (1977), had just come out. She edited The Ploughshares Poetry Reader as well as her own issue, enlisted Donald Hall to guest edit and worked with
Favorite Books from 2020
Plume has a number of talented editors, and given the extraordinary year the world faced, I thought asking them for some of their favorite books of 2020 made sense, as a means of creating space for other voices and perspectives beyond mine and Chelsea’s, but also as a way to showcase more books than are typically possible in a “traditional”
The Clearing by Allison Adair reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar
THE CLEARING Allison Adair Milkweed Editions, 2020 79 pages. $22, hardcover. Allison Adair’s The Clearing opens with two words that haunt the book: “What if.” The title poem, which initiates the collection, imagines, through familiar fairy tale imagery, that our lives unfold as stories wrought with these what ifs. What if this time instead of crumbs the girl
“Alias” by Eric Pankey reviewed by Mark Wagenaar
Alias Eric Pankey Free Verse Editions, Parlor Press 2020 Not to be confused with the television show of the same name, starring Jennifer Garner and beloved by Dwight Schrute, Alias is the second book of prose poems Eric Pankey has published with Free Verse Editions, by Parlor Press. One of the most crucial questions when reading such a volume
Donovan McAbee reviews Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry by John Murillo
John Murillo Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry 2020 Four Way Books $16.95 Paperback Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, John Murillo’s second collection, is a particularly American lamentation, an extended meditation on loss: the inevitability of some losses, the tragic nature of others, and especially the political and existential crisis of loss inflicted on Black American selves and communities by our culture.
Sara Wainscott’s “Insecurity System” reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar
Sara Wainscott Insecurity System 2020 Persea Books $15.95, paperback, 78 pages. Reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar Insecurity System, Sara Wainscott’s debut collection, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, is a series of sonnets, structured loosely as a crown. The more I considered the way she plays with the sonnet form, especially the link between one poem’s
Miho Nonaka’s “The Museum of Small Bones” reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar
Miho Nonaka The Museum of Small Bones. “2020” Ashland Poetry Press. $19.95, paperback. 82 pages. Reviewed by Chelsea Wagenaar “I dreamed of a power // to make small, imperceptible things / perceptible,” Nonaka writes in the title poem, “like the pattern of bones of a bat / in flight. The power to stave off our despair.” These lines
