Poetry Archive

Review: TALES OF TWO AMERICAS edited by John Freeman

Tale of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation  Edited by John Freeman Penguin; Sept 2017 252 pp; $17 Buy: paperback | eBook Reviewed by Anne Kniggendorf In his collection of 36 essays, poems, and stories entitled Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided

Three Philadelphia Women and Their Poetry Chapbooks

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Three of Philly’s poets, Pattie McCarthy, Alina Pleskova, and Rachel Milligan, have published chapbooks on a medieval visionary, conceptions of desire and identity, and the sometimes-creepy underbelly of reality.

Review: SMOOTHIE by Claudine Toutoungi

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Smoothie  Claudine Toutoungi Carcanet Press Ltd, Dec. 1 2017 80 pp; $12.99 Buy: paperback | eBook Reviewed by Peter Pegnall It is rare that a first collection of poems bounces into the mind like a gifted child, difficult, effervescent, wildly inventive and not to be silenced. When it happens,

Review: OUT OF CONTEXT by John Gosslee

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Presented in a series of “blackouts,” which redact the work of numerous contemporary poets, Out of Context reads as an innovative and highly visual ars poetica.

Debut Chapbooks from Barrelhouse, Third Man Books, and Sutra Press

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These three presses dropped their very first chapbook this calendar year: Barrelhouse, known for its literary journal; Third Man Books, Jack White’s Third Man Records’ publishing outlet; and Sutra Press, a brand new micro-press out of Clarksville, Arkansas.

Review: DAYLILY CALLED IT A DANGEROUS MOMENT by Alessandra Lynch

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Lynch’s radiant lyricism throughout the collection expresses the post-traumatic tension of persistent remembering and forgetting rape. Read as poetry of witness, the collection is illuminating, for trauma survivors and for those willing to behold its aftermath.

Three Chapbooks That Marry the Written Word and Visual Art

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Chapbooks that combine the work of a writer with that of a visual artist are rarer than, perhaps, they should be. There’s something special about flipping open a chapbook to find art within its pages as well.

Review: ON WALKING ON by Cole Swensen

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Imagine an anthology of the literature of walking, with examples ranging from the Middle Ages to the present. Now imagine a book containing only commentaries on these ruminations on walking, without the accompaniment of the texts that inspired them.

Chapbook Round-Up: Titles from Cincinnati’s Porkbelly Press

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Porkbelly Press is a Cincinnati-based press that puts out chapbooks and micro-chapbooks as well as a literary magazines and anthologies.

Review: I KNOW YOUR KIND by William Brewer

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With scars across its pages, I Know Your Kind conveys the pervasive shadow the opioid epidemic casts across Oceana—and, by extension, towns like Oceana—in a way that statistics, figures, and journalism cannot.