Lesley Wheeler’s Mycocosmic, Reviewed by Laurie Kuntz
Lesley Wheeler Mycocosmic Tupelo Press Reviewer: Laurie Kuntz Lesley Wheeler’s sixth poetry collection, Mycocosmic, mystifies, engages, and thrills the reader with stories of love, loss, identity, acceptance, and connection. An example of this haunting occurs in “An Underworld”, a poem about parental abuse: I stopped my breath for as long as I could in the […]
Scott Ferry’s Sapphires on the Graves, Reviewed by Rebecca Patrascu
Scott Ferry Sapphires on the Graves Glass Lyre Press Reviewer: Rebecca Patrascu In Scott Ferry’s new collection, Sapphires on the Graves, form, format, and subject work together to create poetic montages, shifting collages of dreams, domestic scenes, and views of the subconscious mind. The opening lines of the first piece, “guam,” place readers immediately in a […]
Joan Kwon Glass’s Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, Reviewed by Elisabeth Adwin Edwards
Joan Kwon Glass Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms Perugia Press Reviewer: Elisabeth Adwin Edwards In her powerful second full-length collection, poet Joan Kwon Glass never shies away from difficult questions. “The first Koreans were part god, part beast,” begins the final stanza of the opening poem, “Bloodline.” The poet continues, “Every morning I look in […]
Jan Beatty’s Dragstripping, Reviewed by Erica Goss
Jan Beatty Dragstripping University of Pittsburg Press Reviewer: Erica Goss Dragstripping, Jan Beatty’s new collection, centers on her lifelong struggle with displacement. Born of a child’s need for safety, such an existence imposes vulnerability and danger; as she writes in “The Body’s River,” “When my mother left me in the orphanage, // I invented love […]
Jeanne Wagner – Vocabulary Lessons
Vocabulary Lessons At thirteen, I look up bruise in the thesaurus, like the bruises on my best friend’s arms and legs, and I find contusion. Later I check innocence and discover naiveté, a word that fits her when she tells me her father never beat her when she was younger because she was such a […]
