Soto’s Time Pieces
Mark Smith-Soto Time Pieces Main Street Rag Publishing Company ISBN: 978-1-59948-511-9 Reviewer: Richard Allen Taylor This is how it’s done. This is how a poet takes situations and events—some ordinary, some not so ordinary—and renders them into extraordinary art. This is how prize-winning poet Mark Smith-Soto drills deep into the emotional core of things, how […]
To the Dark Angels
Jared Smith To the Dark Angels NYQ Books ISBN: 978-1-63045-003-8 Reviewer: Cindy Hochman I hunt for the little things in poets. How little we become of what we want. How insubstantial in the weight of worlds weighing down upon man’s history. —Jared Smith, “Auden’s Apartment” At first, the wall of words that comprises a Jared […]
House of Burnt Offerings
Judith Skillman House of Burnt Offerings Pleasure Boat Studio Press ISBN: 978-0-912887-32-6 Reviewer: Ann Wehrman “And, by the way, don’t worry about what a poem means. Do you ask what a song means before you listen? Just listen. Meaning lives there in a field of powerful understanding before it ever makes its way to words […]
The Teleology of Dunes
Martin Settle The Teleology of Dunes Main Street Rag Publishing Company ISBN: 978-1-59948-498-3 Reviewer: Richard Allen Taylor I didn’t know that word “teleology,” so, like any word lover, I looked it up. My guess was that it would have something to do with the study of movement, as in the shifting of dunes across the […]
The Beast and the Innocent
Diana Pinckney The Beast and the Innocent FutureCycle Press ISBN: 978-1-938853-71-5 Reviewer: Cindy Hochman What a mess we’ve made, the world sinking under our accumulation. —“The Woman Who Loves Takeout,” Diana Pinckney There is no question that Diana Pinckney’s richly knit narrative poems are closer in grace and refinement to Elizabeth Bishop’s than William Blake’s, […]
