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Nikki Wallschlaeger is the author of the collection Houses and the graphic chapbook I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel, two arrangements that undercut artifice and underline activation energies. This month, I dove into one of her new poems from the most recent incarnation of The Journal Petra.
Tomás Q. Morín’s first book of poems, A Larger Country, won the APR/Honickman Prize and was runner-up for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. It’s a collection that brings together a series of different times, places and characters (both historical and imagined) into a new world all its own, one that is both recognizable and decidedly strange….
Workshopping individual poems is one thing; working on a full chapbook or book manuscript is quite another. For the reader or writer who wants to put away the notion of poems as discrete, and to look for a demonstration of poems as part of a fuller structure or a continuous line, away from the…
Little: Novels Emily Anderson BlazeVOX, August 2015 158 pp; $20 Buy: paperback The vogue for erasure poems continues, which is good news. Done skillfully, the erasure poem encompasses what Samuel Johnson called “the two most engaging powers of an author: new things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.” Srikanth Reddy’s Voyager discovers…
It’s a comet, no it’s a planet, no it’s not a planet, yes it is. What is it about Pluto that so draws us to it? Is it that Pluto is so far away? Or is it just that we always pull for the underdog? Over the past few years, especially, as Pluto’s planetary status…
This is the fourth installment of a year-long journey through Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. You can read previous installments here, here and here. ** Query VI: “Productions mineral, vegetable and animal” A notice of the mines and other subterraneous riches; its trees, plants, fruits, &c. At root, Jefferson’s Notes on the…
This collection’s jacked up heart beats in its final piece, “Hatred of Happiness.” “Hatred of Happiness” rejects and buries practically every trope proposed by the mainstream LGBTQ movement. Gone are the banners calling for marriage equality and positive representations of gay life. Gone is the assertion that “we are just like you.”
I’ve read Sarah Sgro’s poetry for about four years, and remain a consistent witness to its various evolutions and concentrations concerning femininity, food, sexuality, and waste. In the past year, Sgro’s work has flourished, wreaked havoc, and run amok through many journals. Because her pieces keep sharpening their knives, it can prove difficult to…
When we go to inspect female-presenting writers, the canon is too familiar: Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen. There’s no purpose in arguing this. What’s more interesting is uncovering forgotten women writers—women who wrote poetry with T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in life, or produced movies with Alfred Hitchcock. It was Patricia Highsmith that Hitchcock,…
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