Chocolate Waters’ Muddying the Holy Waters, Reviewed by Ann Wehrman

Chocolate Waters Muddying the Holy Waters Eggplant Press Reviewer: Ann Wehrman Chocolate Waters’ Muddying the Holy Waters underscores the relevance of her unique first name, a nickname from childhood. Waters offers direct, mature poems about love and life that crack open the reader’s heart with their honesty and, ultimately, satisfy and warm like a cup […]

Amanda Moore’s Requeening, Reviewed by Erica Goss

Amanda Moore Requeening Ecco/HarperCollins Reviewer: Erica Goss “The hive will come to know the new, caged queen. Her scent, alarming at first, will become recognized, comforting.”   —“Requeening” Amanda Moore’s new collection explores the consequences of succession, in beehives and in her own family. “Requeening,” or the process of introducing a new queen to an […]

Katerina Canyon’s Surviving Home, Reviewed by Jessica Drake-Thomas

Katerina Canyon Surviving Home Kelsay Books Reviewer: Jessica Drake-Thomas Katerina Canyon’s Surviving Home, explores familial relationships within black families, in particular the speaker’s toxic relationship with her father. “My father is a shark / with a hope chest / clenched between his teeth,” she writes in the title poem, “It holds my heart and brain […]

Barbara Hamby’s Holoholo, Reviewed by Lee Rossi

Barbara Hamby Holoholo University of Pittsburgh Press Reviewer: Lee Rossi How to describe a book as filled with delights as Barbara Hamby’s Holoholo. Ostensibly a book of odes, these are not just poems of praise; she urges her readers to construe the term “ode” in the widest possible sense: as a “poetic stance, a poetic […]

Diane Frank’s While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems, Reviewed by Brian Fanelli

Diane Frank While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems Glass Lyre Press Reviewed by Brian Fanelli After the last few years of political tumult and after the year that was 2020, Diane Frank’s While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems truly feels like a much-need respite, a booster shot […]