Leigh Rastivo

Poetry Review: Thom Gunn’s AIDS Elegies Still Refuse Abstraction

September 13, 2026
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A new edition of “The Man with Night Sweats” brings the poet’s formal restraint, domestic intimacy, and unsparing attention to individual loss into sharper focus.

Book Review: “A Precise Chaos” — The Omnipresence of Change

May 12, 2025
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“A Precise Chaos” examines, with profundity, intricate human patterns of memory, history, and love, where the personal and the political intertwine and nothing ends cleanly because nothing is ever entirely lost.

Book Review: “The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing’ — Pursuing Creative Inwardness

October 16, 2024
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The ascendancy of digital life is acknowledged as unshakable, but in these essays Sven Birkerts offers useful insights into how serious writers can carry on.

Book Review: “The Letters of Seamus Heaney” – The Burden of Good Fortune

September 10, 2024
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In his letters, Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s tone, and the expanse of his openness, varies according to the addressee — but his approach to all is inevitably marked by seriousness and elegance.

Poetry Review: Hannah Sullivan’s “Was It For This” — The Harsh Reality of Our Transience

January 24, 2023
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The structure, plot, themes, tone, and diction of Was It For This all combine to consecrate the ordinary alongside the exceptional.

Poetry Review: “Places of Permanent Shade” – The Work and Echo of Creation

January 9, 2023
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This staunchly eclectic collection is also fiercely focused, unified by the fact that regardless of the subject, the poet never blinks, never looks away, never hesitates to name the pain.

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