Leonard Gontarek’s The Long Way Home, Reviewed by Vivian Wagner
Leonard Gontarek The Long Way Home BlazeVOX [books] Reviewer: Vivian Wagner Leonard Gontarek’s The Long Way Home is, in fact, a long poetry collection—over 400 pages!—with a sweeping, sublime style to match its length. Perhaps that length is necessary to do what the collection seems to want and need to do: make sense of […]
Alexis Jackson’s My Sisters’ Country, Reviewed by Brian Fanelli
Alexis V. Jackson My Sisters’ Country Kore Press Reviewer: Brian Fanelli Alexis V. Jackson’s collection, My Sisters’ Country, is a book with impressive historical scope—integrating numerous influences and references, and underscoring everyone from Gwendolyn Brooks to June Jordan to the four Black Girls, Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, who […]
Bruce Bond’s patmos, Reviewed by David E. Poston
Bruce Bond patmos University of Massachusetts Press Reviewer: David E. Poston Section III of patmos, Bruce Bond’s new book-length poetic sequence, begins: I was just another creature crawling from the mausoleum, and I thought, so this is it, the place in the final chapter where I’m judged for my cruelties, blunders, failures of attention, and […]
Kathie Collins – Yadkin Valley
Yadkin Valley Shoulder-high clumps of spent grain bend low over the lush green that weaves itself through summer’s stiff leavings—every blade a child burst from its seed. How did they survive winter unbroken, only bowing their heads under the weight of the snow? A bluebird lights on feathered tassel, surveys woods and field for a […]
Ra Malika Imhotep’s gossypiin, Reviewed by Erica Goss
Ra Malika Imhotep gossypiin Red Hen Press Reviewer: Erica Goss In her new collection gossypiin, Ra Malika Imhotep filters her quest for truth through multiple entities. Ancestors float in and out of these poems, offering stories, guidance, and corrections to commonly held misconceptions regarding the lives and experiences of African-American women. Taking its title partially […]
