Ann Hudson – Basketball
Basketball My father nailed a basketball hoop to a catalpa tree beside the shed, a growing tree which in a handful of years would raise that rim far beyond our reach. No matter that dribbling was improbable in the dirt and roots, the glossy, brown catalpa pods crunching underfoot. My sister flung a heavy ball […]
Megan Wildhood – When Do Death and Destruction Break?
When Do Death and Destruction Break? Sacred: every eddy, home run, cat, all flooring, seeds rough air, boulders, ponytails, sinkholes. It is hard to believe that every rock is holy. It’s pouring wind and flood. I long for an earlier date of birth. Old people, who in ancient times did not walk fast, scuttle toward […]
Ilyse Kusnetz’s Angel Bones, Reviewed by Vivian Wagner
Ilyse Kusnetz Angel Bones Alice James Books Reviewer: Vivian Wagner Ilyse Kusnetz’s Angel Bones is a posthumous collection about mortality, and about finding life and connection even in the midst of – and beyond – death. Kusnetz, who died from cancer in 2016, writes about love and loss in a way that’s both lovely and […]
John Sibley Williams’s As One Fire Consumes Another, Reviewed by Ace Boggess
John Sibley Williams As One Fire Consumes Another Orison Books Reviewer: Ace Boggess There is something exceedingly familiar about reading John Sibley Williams’s newest collection, As One Fire Consumes Another, a sense of nostalgia arising as one turns the pages and sees these poems laid out neatly in narrow columns. It’s a flashback to the […]
Kathryn Stripling Byer’s Trawling the Silences, Reviewed by Richard Allen Taylor
Kathryn Stripling Byer Trawling the Silences Jacar Press Reviewer: Richard Allen Taylor Trawling the Silences, according to the substantial, well-written bio at the end of the book, was an unfinished manuscript at the time of Kathryn Stripling Byer’s[1] death in 2017. What makes it “unfinished” is not explained. Perhaps there were drafts of uncompleted poems […]
