Jane Hirshfield recommends Dancing in Odessa, poems by Ilya Kaminsky: ” Dancing in Odessa is not newly published, but it is new to me, and deserves to be recommended. This is an intricate, muscular, startlingly powerful collection, one that amazes by image and statement, by its shaped whole, and by the sheer scope of its…
Maxine Kumin recommends Morning in Serra Mattu, an ode by Arif Gamal: ” Morning in Serra Mattu: A Nubian Ode is actually an oral recitation of life in the Sudan from the 1940’s to the building of the Aswan Dam, as told to E. G. Dubovsky, who recorded it in meter. It is rich with…
Philip Levine recommends Astoria, poems by Malena Mörling: “In a poem by Malena Mörling the reader is taken on trips never bargained for: time may be compressed, action go in reverse; in the blink of a line you can move from Grand Central Station to a design on wallpaper, and yet when you finish the…
Maxine Kumin recommends As When, in Season, by Jim Schley: “This is the executive director of The Frost Place’s first collection of poems and represents years of composing and revising. The centerpiece, an inventive series of odes to the muses, displays Schley’s literary insights and his musical gift with language.” (Marick)
David St. John recommends The Usable Field, by Jane Mead: “There is a far greater spareness to these new poems of Jane Mead’s, yet they are as philosophically complex and stylistically compelling as those in her two previous collections. Yet this more honed style has only amplified the ferocity of her attention to the natural…
David St. John also recommends For a Limited Time Only, by Ronald Wallace: “With his signature humor and elegant wit, Ron Wallace makes clear that the ‘limited time’ of the title is our own mortal passage. This is a death-inflected collection, filled with meditations upon illness that refuse to buckle in the face of the…
Maura Stanton recommends Visit Me in California, by Cooley Windsor: “Cooley Windsor’s brief stories (or are these poems?) are wildly imaginative and wildly funny. This is an unforgetable, orginal book that will make you laugh and think and gasp and hand the book to someone else shouting ‘Read This!!’” (TriQuarterly/Northwestern)
C. D. Wright recommends Midnights, by Jane Miller: “An absorbing performance of art taken to the brink. There is nothing prosaic about Midnights. No one is simply cooking carrots; rather all of its parts contribute to a gestalt of living, loving and losing in a reel of feeling that nonetheless attains a bracing lucidity. This…
David St. John recommends Intaglio, poems by Ariana-Sophia M. Kartsonis: “I only discovered this prize-winning collection earlier this year, and it stunned me with its rich and sensual language and complex narrative architectures. Without question one of the very finest debut volumes of recent years.” (Kent State)
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