book review

Dear Beast Loveliness: Poems of the Body

October 17, 2013
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Tim J. Myers explores the physical and spiritual existences pertaining to the body.

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Lee Sharkey’s Calendars of Fire

October 3, 2013
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In The Book of the Dead, Muriel Rukeyser writes, “What three things can never be done?
 Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone.” In Calendars of Fire, Lee Sharkey refuses to be that historian or activist, tamed in middle age, no longer pained by injustice.

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“If you remain stationary long enough, someone/will bump into you,” OR the Poetry Party is at Lauren Shapiro’s House

September 26, 2013
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You should be tired at the end, but instead you feel exhilarated. This party has punch—strong punch, like the stuff of these poems. It packs a wallop. You thank the host for what you can only describe as an experience not unlike a multi-valent, multi-vocal, multi-dimensional game of Words with Friends.

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Robert Duncan: The Collected Early Poems and Plays

May 21, 2013
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The breadth of that poetic growth is in itself a fantastic teacher.

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Two Works of Spiritual Aspiration: Flowers and Vogel

May 2, 2013
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Poems are “instruments for thinking” (Allen Grossman). The object of a poet’s thought, however, is often unstated–especially in lyric poetry. Lyric poetry never speaks to an audience, and so–as it is when we are alone–the speaker doess not feel compelled to explicitly state the object of thought but only the thoughts themselves. In this review, I want to try and discern these objects of thought in the works of two poets whose work seem directed at resolving particularly spiritual problems.

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Great Table Manners!

March 21, 2013
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Tables proves a raw, every-which-way roaming collection, an enterprise in full creative recall and exposure.

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TRICK VESSELS by Andre Bagoo

January 24, 2013
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The poems of Trick Vessels are not the imposed order and false certainties of neo-conservatism, but an embracing of the power and force of night through the spell casting power of language–the magic that does not destroy uncertainty but which gives it value, and purpose.

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The Book of Knowledge

January 1, 2013
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So, thus far, I am both annoyed and delighted all at once, and I have a sneaking suspicion the poet would not mind that I be both annoyed (or irritated/agitated like a clam) and delighted all at once.

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A New Twist on Confessional Poetics? Mayakovsky’s Revolver, by Matthew Dickman

August 23, 2012
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Matthew Dickman received the second fan letter I’ve ever written. The first was written in 1989, when I was ten years old, and it was addressed to Howard Johnson, an infielder for the New York Mets.

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Won’t the Trees Be Tall Again If We Climb Again

May 3, 2012
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A review of Fast Animal by Tim Seibles

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Book Review: Map of the Folded World (John Gallaher)

April 2, 2010
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Gallaher has managed to create a language all his own using English words. Reading his poems, I felt like I’d arrived on some other world where the linguistic building blocks were familiar, but the physics of assembling them was completely different, surprising, otherworldly.

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