Poetry
James Longenbach’s ear for the nuances of diction, tone, stress, and the material aspects of poetry is so good, and his grasp of context and biography so assured, one wonders why the essays so often tie themselves into semantic and logical knots.
David Allen Sullivan has no combat experience here or abroad, but his verse offers a poignant vision of the sights, sounds, and passions of the Iraq War. Matt Kraunelis replicates the landscapes of his hometown, planting the reader’s feet firmly in the Merrimack Valley.
This anthology, made up of Michael Wolfe’s superb translations of ancient Greek epitaphs, begins in prehistory and ends in the sixth century C.E.
“The Beginning-End of Yiddish,” is poet/essayist Richard Fein’s core subject: his love for a language largely eviscerated in his lifetime.
Poems of concise and precise description and philosophy find their way among poems of memory and daily life, money, art, love, and the oddities in giving names. J. Kates’s technique is alive and various throughout.
Consider these few notes my handing The Porcupine of Mind off to you — you read it, you write about it, then we’ll come back and talk.
Alice Oswald’s “Memorial” begins with a list of 214 names, a bare, sorrowful cousin to the ship’s roll. If you know the old stories, you’ll begin to recognize some names, and then start to look forward to others.
If the poems in “That Said: New and Selected Poems” had been ordered differently, the volume would have made more of its virtues.
Poet Mel Kenne, like a desert ascetic, has pared away everything that is not essential -— no words have been wasted in the making of this collection.
Swarms in the train station! Improv in the library! Video game hits and poetry! Must be Jazz Week–and there’s plenty more, including a major CD release by Argentinian bassist Fernando Huergo paying tribute to the land of the Albiceleste.
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