Jim Kates

Poetry Review: “Other Paths for Shahrazad” — Poetic Voices That Bleed and Live

April 11, 2026
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Jennifer Jean’s bilingual collection reveals how contemporary Arab women poets redefine storytelling, identity, and survival.

Poetry Review: The Sound of Sighs Restored — A.M. Juster’s New “Canzoniere”

April 7, 2026
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What may look at first like exercises in verbal acrobatics — closely rhymed sonnets, delicate madrigals, intricate sestinas — are simultaneously expressions of confessional, personal anguish.

Poetry Review: “Sky of Sudden Changes” — In Living Color

January 3, 2026
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Many of the poems in this new collection take in the world through a distinctively painterly eye for scenes and sketches.

Book Review: “Fifty Poems” — An Offering on the Altar of Rainer Maria Rilke

October 7, 2025
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If, as a commemorative volume, “Fifty Poems” introduces readers to sample the German poet more extensively, either in the original or in the range of translations currently available, it will have accomplished a valuable task.

Book Review: “Ne me quitte pas” — A Guide to a Song That Crosses Borders

August 9, 2025
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This splendid book is a love letter and a dissertation, almost a song in itself.

Book Review: Rachel Hadas'”Pastorals” — Everything We Want Poetry To Do

July 24, 2025
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Rachel Hadas’s book of prose poems is a set of meditations grounded in a life well lived and much observed, an experimental field for examining the nature of [human] potentialities.

Book Review: “On Frost and Eliot” — No Contest

April 10, 2025
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The value of “On Frost and Eliot” is sending the reader spinning out of its own text and back to poems by two of the major poets of the 20th century, each of whom has suffered from the vagaries of fashion, both in popularity and neglect.

Book Review: “Nat Turner, Black Prophet” — An Evangelical Rebellion

August 10, 2024
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Authors Anthony E. Kaye  and Gregory P. Downs claim that Nat Turner would have seen himself as a Christian prophet.

Theater Review: “Ben Butler” — A Verbally Dexterous Comedy About Serious Business

August 1, 2024
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This production brings the Peterborough Players back in line with their own best traditions: entertaining, thoughtful, delightfully irreverent.

Poetry Review: “Catullus: Selected Poems” — A Comfortable Intro to an Uncomfortable Poet

April 24, 2024
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Translator Stephen Mitchell serves Catullus best with the poems that don’t demand cleverness, where the sentiment is at least seemingly direct.

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