Reviews

Fall 2011

 

 

Heart Turned Back
by Bertha Rogers

Salmon Poetry, 2010; 79 pages; $12.00
ISBN: 978-1-907056-26-0, paper
http://www.salmonpoetry.com

Reviewed by Melinda Thomsen

Like the beautifully rendered cover by the poet herself, Bertha Rogers' new collection of poetry is intricately visually blended as she searches for home. Indeed, home is where the heart is; but for Rogers, home is not a clichè, so in the poem "Blue Sky" we see a complex and provocative view of where it is:  Read Review

 

What the Water Gave Me, Poems After Frida Kahlo
by Pascale Petit

Black Lawrence Press, 2011; 64 pages; $14.00
ISBN: 978-0982876657, paper
http://pascalepetit.co.uk/index.php?f=data_poetry_collections&a=0

Reviewed by Lynn McGee

What the Water Gave Me, Poems After Frida Kahlo, by Pascale Petit was published by Seren Press in Wales in 2010, and by Black Lawrence Press in the U.S., in 2011. The collection was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year, and was a Book of the Year in London's Observer.  Read Review

 

"I come complete":
Elizabeth Harrington's The Quick and the Dead

Grayson Books, 2010; 30 pages, $10.00
ISBN: 978-0-9785382-6-2, paper
http://www.graysonbooks.com/TheQuickandTheDead.htm

Reviewed by Brant Lyon

When faced with life's most difficult challenges and dealing with personal tragedy, perhaps what most sets a poet apart from someone else is the ability to put into words in the most artful way the brutal, the delicate, ineffable, obvious, esoteric, or universal in human experience. Or, as that homespun and inelegant saying about life's lemons puts it: to make lemonade.  Read Review

 

Immersion
by Michele Wolf

The Word Works, 2011; 90 pages; $15.00
ISBN: 9780915380800, paper
http://michelewolf.com/books.html

Reviewed by Tina Barr

Michele Wolf's Immersion is a deftly organized collection of narrative poems. Wolf orchestrates a poignant, even comic, series, safely this side of the sentimental. From the perspective of middle age, we are immersed in "the bristling panorama that is adulthood," reflected in a range of poems based on the adoption of a Chinese girl, made available to this American couple because of China's limits on family size, or the physical terrors of returning veterans from Iraq, or an eight year old Zambian girl's future, or poems on the varieties of marital love, or death through "the slow acid of cancer." The circumstances in these poems are conveyed in direct, transparent, often incandescent language. The poet and her husband's adoption of their daughter is central to the speaker's life in relation to others; the book incorporates poems on husband, mother, father, sister, niece, cousin and aunt. But the poems push outward, into Civil War history, a celebration of Chinese New Year, the imagined life of a Barbie doll, on the subject of writing as a journalist and as a poet. One of the poems on writing is the marvelous "Arranging the Books." In this poem the writer recollects W. S. Merwin, "his eyes, a crystal blue like captured starlight." The final lines recall his advice, "'We don't write poems,'" he maintained, "'We listen for them.'"  Read Review

 

URBAN HAIKU AND MORE: Haiku, Senruy, Hay(Na)Ku
and other Unrhymed Tercet Poetry
by Patricia Carragon

Fierce Grace Press, 2010; 52 pages; $7.00
http://flordelconcreto.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-from-fierce-grace-urban-haiku-by.html

Reviewed by George Wallace

It's been roughly a century that American poetry has had a dalliance with the Japanese Haiku, and during most of it, American practitioners wrestled mightily with a form that is at once elusive and tantalizing.  Read Review

 

End of American Magic
by Christopher Locke

Salmon Poetry, 2010; 76 pages; $21.95
ISBN: 978-1-907056-53-6
http://www.salmonpoetry.com

Reviewed by Rachel Bennett

Memories don't arrange
themselves neatly, like beetles
pinned in straight black rows:
they're a house of cards
after one breath.…

Building on this play (from the poem "Still Life with School Bus"), Christopher Locke's End of American Magic is a game of 52 Pickup. Nearly every poem within the collection's three sections contains a lasting image, whether of an alliterative grasshopper with "wings / clicking like a baseball card / in bicycle spokes" or a heart as "a small bird before it discovers / a windshield." The poems attempt to work through the speakers' addictions, desires and labors of many sorts. They stitch together family histories, parents as children, lost brothers, unborn babies. But the best parts are less stitched, come closer to "the sea crashing indifferently / against this world of heat / and land."  Read Review

 

The Woman Who Wouldn't Shake Hands
by Chocolate Waters

Poets Wear Prada Press, 2010; 46 pages; $12.00
ISBN 978-0935060096, paper
http://pwpbooks.blogspot.com/

Reviewed by Linda Lerner

This quirky collection of skinny looking poems, lacking punctuation, belittle the enormous territory they cover: it is nothing less than the human heart—that need for love and a corresponding need that guards against its fulfillment. An acknowledged lesbian, Chocolate Waters transcends its definition and any other which seeks to confine her. This is evident in the unexpected turns her poems take often doing a complete about face.  Read Review

 

The Archer Hits His Target Partly by Pulling,
Partly by Letting Go:
A Review of You Are White Inside
by B.R. Lyon

Three Rooms Press, 2011; 76 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9835813-2-1, paper
http://threeroomspress.com/

Reviewed by Larissa Shmailo

As epigram to the final poem of this witty and moving collection, B.R. Lyon quotes the Egyptian proverb, "The archer hits his target partly by pulling, partly by letting go." The proverb partly describes Lyon's modus operandi in this first book, which takes aim by pulling the reader's leg with humor and tugging at the reader's heartstrings with vulnerability and compassion.  Read Review