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Book Reviews

  • Sidetracks by Bei Dao Reviewed by Christian Detisch

    I have set for myself what I now realize is an impossible task: reviewing Bei Dao.
    Plume Issue #160 December 2024

  • Sam Sax’s “Pig” reviewed by Timothy Liu

    Full disclosure: his latest book is overwhelming, a glutfest. Imagine walking into a restaurant and ordering off an eighty-plus-page menu that only serves some concoction of pork for every course offered (including dessert!).
    Plume Issue #159 November 2024

  • Susan L. Leary’s “Dressing the Bear” reviewed by Jane Zwart

    Brian is on every page thereafter, too.
    Plume Issue #158 October 2024

  • John Yau’s “Tell It Slant” reviewed by Timothy Liu

    When someone asks, “What are you reading these days?” I often want to respond, “That’s none of your business!”
    Plume Issue #157 September 2024

  • Victoria Chang’s With My Back to the World reviewed by Linda Mills Woolsey

    Victoria Chang’s With My Back to the World is a stunning book that merges fiercely disciplined form with wild thought and mordant wit.
    Plume Issue #156 August 2024

  • Timothy Liu on Hafiz’s “Little Book of Life”

    Will the real Hafiz (Shams al-Din Mohammad Hafiz-e Shirazi, 1325-1390 CE), aka Hafez, please stand up?
    Plume Issue #155 July 2024

  • Dan O’Brien’s ‘Survivor’s Notebook’ reviewed by Amanda Newell

    It would be easy enough to call Dan O’Brien’s latest collection, Survivor’s Notebook, a prose-poem sequence—it’s what the book calls itself.
    Plume Issue #154 June 2024

  • Penelope Pelizzon’s A Gaze Hound that Hunteth by the Eye reviewed by Jane Zwart

    Were I not smitten, ahead of time, with V. Penelope Pelizzon’s poems, I might have passed over her newest collection
    Plume Issue #153 May 2024

  • Timothy Liu Ruminates on Timmy Straw’s ‘The Thomas Salto’ in Five Short Lyrics

    This blockbuster debut is so far
    Plume Issue # 152 April 2024

  • Sarabande’s Another Last Call: poems on addiction and deliverance reviewed by Celeste Lipkes

    One of the most useful things I did during my psychiatry training was attend an open AA meeting.
    Plume Issue #151 March 2024

  • Rae Armantrout’s “Notice” reviewed by James Sherry

    I notice that most writing called ecopoetry turns out to be little other than pastoral description of the kind that has been around for 2000+ years.
    Plume Issue #150 February 2024

  • Review of Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali by Jane Zwart

    All of us who read poetry, I suspect, have stanzas to which we return for reassurance
    Issue #149 January 2024