Robert Gibb: After
In “The Deer Lay Down Their Bones,” one of his last great poems, the oft-neglected master Robinson Jeffers shows an uncharacteristic vulnerability. Reeling from the death of his beloved wife and muse Una, Jeffers yearns for the “dense green laurel” and “sweet wind” that make a sanctuary for deer where their hunting wounds slowly claim them. Lyrical and intimate, Jeffers’s engagement with nature’s ancient pulse—its amorality, its indifference to human suffering, its sublime beauty and ability to comfort—render the poem haunting yet tender.
In Brief: Tommye Blount, Jennifer Ghivan, Saarah Pape, Shelly Wong
With the sensuality of Carl Philips and the edginess of Wanda Coleman, Tommye Blount’s debut chapbook What Are We Not For searches for the self by interrogating the male body as a liminal site for desire and violence. Questions of race and queer love dominate Blount’s best poems, ranging from the anxious tenderness of “But the Weather, the Weather,” which depicts two new lovers chitchatting in a hotel room, to the hallucinatory “Of a Wicked Boy,” which reimagines a sexually awakened Pinocchio being stripped and violated by a mob of adolescents.
Janice N. Harrington: Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippen
Two epigraphs from the esteemed Cornel West introduce the seventh section of Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin, and the latter seems particularly resonant for its melancholy poignancy. “Can the reception of the work of a black artist,” West asks, “transcend mere documentary, social pleading or exotic appeal?” Poet Janice N. Harrington’s third poetry collection traces the arc of this very question in its examination of Horace H. Pippin, a World War I hero and intuitive artist who began painting in middle-age to express his lifelong creative yearning, cope with the trauma of battle, and celebrate the richness of African-American culture.
Review: Frannie Lindsay
In his exquisite, jazzy homage to Frederick Douglass, Robert Hayden resists the elegy’s gravitational pull toward mere grief or mere celebration. Instead, his closing lines affirm that Douglass’s crusade lives on when future generations strive to flesh “his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.” Though poet Frannie Lindsay has a far different voice from Hayden’s, she nonetheless shares his exploration of the elegy as a capacious form where readers discover a spiritual call to endure even as we mourn.
Anna Świrszczyńska: Building The Barricade
The narratives of horror and depravity that emerged from World War II remain impossible to tally, defying hyperbole even seven decades later. While most American readers are familiar with the Normandy invasion and siege of Stalingrad, few may know the tale of the Warsaw Uprising, which lasted for sixty-three days when the Polish resistance Home Army, outmanned and outgunned, repelled German forces and waited desperately for Russian reinforcements that never came. The outcome was appalling: a quarter-million Polish casualties, the shame of surrender, and the near-destruction of a robust and cultured city.
Katharine Rauk: Buried Choirs
The work of Marianne Moore, arguably our quirkiest American modernist, has recently enjoyed an overdue revival. Perhaps in our precipitous moment of technological obsession and ecological ruin, Moore’s poems affirm curiosity, morality, and respect for the natural world as bedrock values in our literature and our democracy. In “Avec Ardeur,” Moore cheekily lectures Ezra Pound, ending with a curt final couplet: “Nothing mundane is divine;/Nothing divine is mundane.”
In Brief: Hera Lindsay Bird, Michelle Bitting, Bruce Bond, Aracelis Girmay, Connie Wanek
“If you slit your wrists while winking,” New Zealander Hera Lindsay Bird asks in her debut collection’s opening poem, “does that make it a joke?” Emblematic of her punk-rock aesthetic, Bird’s rhetorical question is the first of many self-interrogations readers encounter in Hera Lindsay Bird, a spectacle of a book where irony, crassness, and unvarnished emotional disclosure intentionally overwhelm poet and reader alike. The book’s cover sets the tone: Bird herself appears crouching, her face hidden by a mop of brown hair, her body swallowed by a canary yellow rain slicker above her name printed twice in all-caps.
Mark Yakich: Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide
Metaphor is a form of illness. Sometimes writers ought to clothe rather than bare their souls. If we don’t know a word we encounter in a poem, we should look it up or die. These sort of irreverent and often profound pronouncements define Mark Yakich’s Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide, which seeks to bridge the gap between those haughty academic treatises on verse (such as Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading) and those quaint, but ultimately limited, workbooks brimming with writing exercises.
Lucia Perillo: Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones: Selected and New Poems
Esteemed sports writer and NPR commentator Frank Deford is, at first blush, an odd choice to narrate the 2002 PBS documentary The French Impressionists. Thankfully, most viewers are oblivious to, or quickly overlook, Deford’s lack of scholarly credentials upon hearing his emotive and nuanced voiceover, which is particularly moving on the work of Edgar Degas. “Although a traditionalist in so many ways,” Deford asserts, “Degas was absolutely daring in his art—none of the other Impressionists ever chose such unusual perspectives.”
Grevel Lindop: Luna Park
In “O Taste and See,” one of her most famous poems, Denise Levertov rejects the brooding grimness that defines Wordsworth’s Industrial Revolution lament “The World Is Too Much With Us.” Though she acknowledges grief and death by name, Levertov ultimately seeks a courage beyond poetic condemnation, beckoning us to go on “living in the orchard and being/hungry, and plucking/the fruit.” Though “O Taste and See” is often hastily misread as a carpe diem poem, Levertov chose the orchard as her final symbol purposefully, since it suggests that the beauty and bounty of our world require patience, cultivation, and protection.
Mahtem Shiferraw: Fuschia
“In the Lion’s Den,” a rare persona poem in Mahtem Shiferraw’s debut poetry collection Fuchsia, gives voice to the biblical Daniel, who yearns “to open my/mouth and tell them something, anything—/speak as if I have any authority upon/myself.” One senses Shiferraw herself behind these lines since her poems brim with questions of identity, as they traverse the fraught majesty of her native Ethiopia and Eritrea, and later, document a tentative relocation to the United States.
Adrian C. Louis: Random Exorcisms
Grief and irreverence rarely align in poetry. We have our wistful poets and we have our witty poets, conventional wisdom insists, and everyone guards their own dominion. In his most recent collection, however, Adrian C. Louis embraces mournfulness and mockery alike. Guided by a wife’s passing, Louis’ poems also lament the difficulties of aging, the marginalization of American Indians, and the legacy of regional decay, all while poking fun at academia, pop culture, and the male libido.
