Human Hours by Catherine Barnett
As Barnett unfolds for readers the hours of a particular human life, she simultaneously asks readers to examine their own hours.
Poetry
When Rap Spoke Straight to God by Erica Dawson
Readers must view Dawson’s book-length poem from an intersectional lens—regarding the impact on the narrative voices of the white gaze, the male gaze, and the gaze of the self—in order to fully experience its nuances.
Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Invoking the “boundless” and the “limitless,” Nezhukumatathil sets out a simple, yet profound, argument about our relations with the natural world: the more we feel the ocean’s embrace, the sooner we sense its particular “hum” everywhere.
Review: SARAJEVO ROSES by Rory Waterman
Sarajevo Roses is a volume packed with journeys, but this is a poet who attends to the enduring as well as the transient, he constructs gritty, unsentimental pastorals in the noble peasant tradition of Clare, Hardy, Edward Thomas and Robert Frost.
Book Reviews | Fiction | Nonfiction | Poetry
Review: TALES OF TWO AMERICAS edited by John Freeman
Tale of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation Edited by John Freeman Penguin; Sept 2017 252 pp; $17 Buy: paperback | eBook Reviewed by Anne Kniggendorf In his collection of 36 essays, poems, and stories entitled Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, John Freeman, curator of contemporary…
Three Philadelphia Women and Their Poetry Chapbooks
Three of Philly’s poets, Pattie McCarthy, Alina Pleskova, and Rachel Milligan, have published chapbooks on a medieval visionary, conceptions of desire and identity, and the sometimes-creepy underbelly of reality.
Review: SMOOTHIE by Claudine Toutoungi
Smoothie Claudine Toutoungi Carcanet Press Ltd, Dec. 1 2017 80 pp; $12.99 Buy: paperback | eBook Reviewed by Peter Pegnall It is rare that a first collection of poems bounces into the mind like a gifted child, difficult, effervescent, wildly inventive and not to be silenced. When it happens, woe betide the over cautious critic…
Review: OUT OF CONTEXT by John Gosslee
Presented in a series of “blackouts,” which redact the work of numerous contemporary poets, Out of Context reads as an innovative and highly visual ars poetica.
Debut Chapbooks from Barrelhouse, Third Man Books, and Sutra Press
These three presses dropped their very first chapbook this calendar year: Barrelhouse, known for its literary journal; Third Man Books, Jack White’s Third Man Records’ publishing outlet; and Sutra Press, a brand new micro-press out of Clarksville, Arkansas.