Poetry Archive
The Facts of Life: Poems and Real Deaths
Lately, I keep running across poems in collections and in literary journals that use facts or trivia as part of, and sometimes the heart of, their piece. What place does the language of fact, of historical tidbits and pop culture trivia have within the language of poetry?
I Forgot to Remember to Forget: Three Poetry Chapbook Reviews
For National Poetry Month this year, I read three poetry chapbooks that revolve around memory. Childhood memory, historical memory, the body’s learned memory, how place or sound or smell or language or popular culture evokes memory—the chapbooks here all touch on one or more or many of these themes.
Review: THE SPIRIT PAPERS by Elizabeth Metzger
This book is a book about heaven. It’s about the collection of human connections and love that make a heaven. In that case, The Spirit Papers is its own little immaculate heaven.
Dismantling Binary: Three Reviews of Genderqueer & Trans Writers’ Chapbooks
This month, I read work from both genderqueer and transgender writers. Inspired by recent tweets, blog posts, and press releases supporting works by these writers, it seemed a good opportunity to spotlight these three chapbooks.
Victory is Hers! Three Contest-Winning Chapbooks by Women
This month, I read three award-winning chapbooks—which happen all to have been written by women.
Review: WHEREAS By Layli Long Soldier
Whereas Layli Long Soldier Graywolf; March 7, 2017 120 pp; $16 Buy: paperback Few Americans seem to know much about the Indian Occupation of Alcatraz, and fewer still are acquainted with the Occupation’s “Proclamation,” a masterful document that deploys the language, diction, and vocabulary of unfair treaties and paternalism
Review: IN FULL VELVET by Jenny Johnson
For her debut collection In Full Velvet, poet Jenny Johnson's address begins with “Thank you,” and it is radical, as if a muse might peer over the edge of her throne and say, “My, those are words I have not heard for some time.”
“Hyperconsciousness of the Historical Instability of Words”: An Interview with Monica Youn
Monica Youn’s poems are precise, sharp-edged and fleet-footed; they always seem to be moving in three different directions at once. She is the author of three books of poems: Blackacre, Barter, and Ignatz, and her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. A former attorney, she now teaches
William Carlos Williams, Poet of Suburbia
When I came in for a chicken pox shot, my mother mentioned to Dr. William Eric Williams that she could recite one of his father’s poems from memory. “Let’s hear it,” he said.
3 DoubleCross Press Chapbooks: Style Meets Sonority
DoubleCross Press makes gorgeous letter press chapbooks. But these aren’t just pretty faces; it’s what’s on the inside—poetry, poetics and "prose-ish" pieces—that counts. This month, I review three of them.