I’m sitting in a London lecture theater and thinking of my mother, dead just these three weeks— and by the way, reader, this will not, repeat, not, be one more crappy poem about a dying mother!— as I listen to Dr. David Parker speaking on “Love and Death in Dickens,” how the…
Ms. Maclay has a superb lyric gift, a remarkable imagistic clarity, and a constant sense of invention. Her recent prose poems—a departure for her—strike me as some of the most gracious and compelling of the genre. She is melding the concerns of her more fiercely lyric pieces with a more elongated music phrasing, and the…
I: I’d rather have a granddaughter who’s a whore than a grandson who’s a faggot like you. In the empty parking lot of St. Jude’s Church in Westchester, on a summer day, she lets go and falls to the gritty pavement while I pedal and pedal and glide without training wheels for the first time….
Then I wouldn’t prefer the California wine, its big sugar, big fruit rolling down my tongue, a cornucopia spilled across a tacky tablecloth. I’d prefer the French, its smoke and rot. Said Cézanne: Le monde—c’est terrible! Which means, The world—it bites the big weenie. People sound smarter in French. The Japanese prefer the crescent moon…
A poem is a room that contains the house it’s in, the way you accommodate me when I lie beside you, even if the address is lost so many times and the names of streets are strangers that pass shuffling a card-deck of maps whose rubber band has snapped: still beyond all chance or choice…
Recommendation: What I find unusual in Alissa Valles’s poems is a very strong expression of intellectual passion invested into the historical—or strictly personal—world. Her poetry is coming close to a kind of a “dynamic wisdom” maybe best exemplified in poems like “Two Gods.” I think there’s an exceptional promise in her work, in her spiritual…
Ms. Benis has the gifted ability to relay intensity through quiet, subtle language. I am impressed also by her direct, insightful statements which keep the poems tense and alive. I, as you, read a great deal of new poetry, and I am happy (and relieved) to read work that doesn’t just convey sincerity, but which…
Drawing upon a keen intellect, historic and mythic images, and from her own Indian heritage, Minal makes poems that address essential mysteries. What compels me is how she is able to shape an image that offers revelation, and yet she retains what’s ineffable and unknowable. Like an Escher print, "dots" become "birds/with wing-length and body…
Recommendation: “The Quarrel” is a brilliantly written, searing glimpse into the life of Staszek Czyzowski, Polish survivor of World War II camps, and his ruined wife, Kasia. The writer’s exquisite portrait of this stubborn, furious man, rendered without a bit of sentimentality, is so devastating it takes my breath away each time I reread it….
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