I did not know before encountering this anthology’s opening fact that the eastern cougar, “puma, mountain lion, wildcat, catamount, painter, mountain screamer, in all its many names,” had been declared extinct in 2018 from where I am from. This caught a latch in my throat, lighter to such knowledge’s touch than I’d expected.
With her third collection, out last week, Éireann Lorsung’s ambition is clear: to conduct a historical audit in poetry of the points of history her life touches.
The activity of thinking, with its accidental sparkings and discursive connections, propels Pimone Triplett through the sonically dense occasional poems that make up her 2017 collection, in which she repurposes some of poetry’s perhaps more conservative elements—form and tradition—to radically reoriented ends.
The question of a collection whose various subjects are assembled, rather than logically produced, is less what they have in common; it is instead what they make in common.
Alsous’s poetics is politically radical not just nominally, or because of its allegiances or her biography. The poems in her prizewinning debut collection are at work chronicling and postulating a reordering of things, or a world dreamed into decolonial being, an abolition in language on the level of affect and feeling.
What is at the core of Tracy Zeman’s debut poetry collection is the understanding and articulation of the links between things—between flora and fauna, sediments, barns, fossils, graveyards, and violent events traceable in the landscape and memory.
Deeply rooted in Black feminist discourse, Metta Sáma’s second full-length book of poetry is part of a line of historical poetics—part documentary, part interpretative—that refuses to distinguish between the horrors of the past and their ongoing inflections in the present.
More often than not, Levertov claimed she was not whichever appellation had come to her doorstep. But her objections have more to do with the consequences of public identity than her actual political orientation, which was a lifelong commitment to poetry as but one form of protest.
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