Poetry Archive

Nightingale by Paisley Rekdal

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Paisley Rekdal’s sixth poetry collection explores the ways desire, pain, fear, and trauma transform us, often without our permission, and often into something unexpected.

The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye

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Nye’s melding of voices in her new poetry collection is an activism of its own. Not only does this decision create a space for Palestinian mourning, it also actively works to shatter an us versus them mentality with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Dissolve by Sherwin Bitsui

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At the center of Dissolve, a single line repeats four times: "I breathe it in." These inhalations encapsulate both the rich density and the immersive capacity of Bitsui's work.

The Shallows by Stacey Lynn Brown

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Though each of these poems embodies the heaviness of illness, their beauty is evinced in the pauses, the generous white spaces to be found in this book of poems.

Everyone Rides the Bus in a City of Losers by Jason Freure

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But in Montreal, according to Freure's speaker, everyone is a loser in the best sense of the word.

So Far So Good by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Readers who rest in these meditative poems are sure to find the voice of the beloved Le Guin just as intriguing as they did in her prose.

Human Hours by Catherine Barnett

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As Barnett unfolds for readers the hours of a particular human life, she simultaneously asks readers to examine their own hours.

When Rap Spoke Straight to God by Erica Dawson

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Readers must view Dawson's book-length poem from an intersectional lens—regarding the impact on the narrative voices of the white gaze, the male gaze, and the gaze of the self—in order to fully experience its nuances.

Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

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Invoking the “boundless” and the “limitless,” Nezhukumatathil sets out a simple, yet profound, argument about our relations with the natural world: the more we feel the ocean’s embrace, the sooner we sense its particular “hum” everywhere.

Review: SARAJEVO ROSES by Rory Waterman

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Sarajevo Roses is a volume packed with journeys, but this is a poet who attends to the enduring as well as the transient, he constructs  gritty, unsentimental pastorals in the noble peasant tradition of Clare, Hardy, Edward Thomas and Robert Frost.