Book Reviews

  • 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
  • Graham Foust’s “Terminations” reviewed by Timothy Liu

    I once heard a literary critic say: “Fifty years from now, John Ashbery will more or less sound like Mary Oliver.
    Issue #148 December 2023
  • Little Poems, ed. Michael Hennessy Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series, reviewed by Amit Majmudar

    All anthologies are arbitrary, but some are more arbitrary than others.
    Issue #147 November 2023
  • On Frank Stanford by Timothy Liu

    They say you die three times.
    Issue #146 October 2023
  • Jared Beloff’s “Who Will Cradle Your Head” reviewed by Linda Mills Woolsey

    In A Sand County Almanac (1949), Aldo Leopold writes: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
    Issue #145 September 2023
  • Timothy Liu reviews Ana Božičević’s “New Life”

    I was strolling through Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan and happened upon a reading at the outdoor Reading Room.
    Issue #144 August 2023
  • Celeste Lipkes’ “Radium Girl” reviewed by Jane Zwart

      review of Radium Girl by Celeste Lipkes. University of Wisconsin Press, 2023. Diane Seuss, in her essay “Restless Herd,” addresses poets. She says, “In writing and ordering your poems, you are forging a self. Housing it in a stall of its own making. You are building a bearable myth.”* As I read (and reread) Celeste Lipkes’s debut, Radium Girl,

    Issue #143 July 2023
  • Adam Scheffler’s “Heartworm” reviewed by DeWitt Henry

    Adam Scheffler’s HEARTWORM: POEMS is a brilliant, laconic, and intensely alert second collection of 40 poems
    Issue #142 June 2023
  • John Moessner’s Harmonia reviewed by Peter Vertacnik

    John Moessner’s debut collection of poems published this month by Stephen F. Austin State University Press, is a book suffused with death and grieving.
    Issue #141 May 2023
  • “This We in the Back of the House” by Jacob Sunderlin reviewed by Jimmie Cumbie

    Let’s make praise: Jacob Sunderlin’s debut, This We In The Back Of The House, is an often bruising and intrepid collection of Indiana-based poems
    Issue #140 April 2023