Irène Mathieu’s Grand Marronage , Reviewed by Vivian Wagner
Irène Mathieu Grand Marronage Switchback Books Reviewer: Vivian Wagner Irène Mathieu’s Grand Marronage is a collection of poems about escape, freedom, community, and intergenerational trauma. The term “grand marronage” refers to people who escaped the slavery of plantations and established their own communities outside of slave society. The book’s poems explore literal and figurative grand […]
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 […]
Heather H. Thomas’s Vortex Street, Reviewed by Ann Wehrman
Heather H. Thomas Vortex Street FutureCycle Press Reviewer: Ann Wehrman Exploring Heather H. Thomas’s 2018 poetry collection Vortex Street, one stumbles into a dappled forest’s clearing where an ageless woman in a flowing, floral skirt and bright silk blouse, black hair glowing down her back, smiles and beckons one into her wagon. Every surface has […]
