poetry

A woman levitating in front of a building
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“Sometimes she is a space” : Janice Lee’s Reconsolidation: Or, It’s the ghosts who will answer you

Taking up the mantel of memory and elegy is no easy task, but Janice Lee’s new book Reconsolidation: Or, it’s the ghosts who will answer you embraces the ghosts. The text is not so much a reflection on writing, loss, memory, and death, but a twisted projection of those topics. The medium is under as…

C.K. Williams

So Long, Dear Writer

  The poet C.K. Williams died this Sunday, September 20, 2015. For the last few months I’ve been enjoying a review copy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s beautiful new collection of Williams’ poems, the Selected Later Poems, but I’m finding that now, in light of Williams’ death, I can’t read the book in quite the…

“It’s A Bit Mysterious, and I Like That”: An Interview with Frank X. Gaspar
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“It’s A Bit Mysterious, and I Like That”: An Interview with Frank X. Gaspar

Frank X. Gaspar writes poems that are lyrical, powered by swift associations, and full of surprising images and leaps in thought that in retrospect make perfect sense. He is the author of five collections of poems, including Late Rapturous and The Holyoke, as well as two novels, most recently Stealing Fatima. Frank was born and…

Review:  LIFE IN A BOX IS A PRETTY LIFE by Dawn Lundy Martin
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Review: LIFE IN A BOX IS A PRETTY LIFE by Dawn Lundy Martin

Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life Dawn Lundy Martin Nightboat Books, 2015 Poetry | $15.95 104 pages, 6 x 9 in Buy: Paperback Dawn Lundy Martin’s two previous collections, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (2007) and Discipline (2011), were remarkable both for the rigor of their investigations of identity…

“The dead do not cease in the grave” : Srikanth Reddy’s The Voyager
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“The dead do not cease in the grave” : Srikanth Reddy’s The Voyager

Why do we erase? We make mistakes. Or, different words demand emphasis. Or, we want to return to the beginning. In creating a poem out of erasing another text, we ask questions of the text itself, but we also open up an analysis of silence. The Voyager is an erasure poem by Srikanth Reddy that…

The Poem and the Hotel

The Poem and the Hotel

Dear Loews Luxury Hotels & Resorts, When you decided to move in, we were nervous. This is Chicago, an unsophisticated Midwestern city, and you’ve built your leisure palaces for the super-rich all over North America. We’ve been hurt by people like that before. (Don’t get us started about that giant “TRUMP” emblazoned 200 feet above…

“This World and the World Just Beyond It”: An Interview with Brynn Saito
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“This World and the World Just Beyond It”: An Interview with Brynn Saito

Brynn Saito’s poems are lyrical, sometimes mystical, dream-like yet also grounded in what feels like lived life. Her debut book, The Palace of Contemplating Departure, is marked by a striking voice that sounds both of this world and as if it comes from somewhere far above it. With Traci Brimhall, she also co-authored the chapbook Bright…