I have been traveling on and off, since early May, so I only just got the chance to be amazed by this wonderful new review of Wolf Skin in the latest issue of American Book Review! Huge thanks are in order to Saara Myrene Raappana for her insightful close reading. Here's an excerpt: Reaching beyond the simple retelling or recasting …
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My review of Jeannine Hall Gailey's haunting new poetry collection, The Robot Scientist's Daughter, is up at The Rumpus: Jeannine Hall Gailey’s fourth poetry collection, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, reanimates the haunting world of 1970s Oak Ridge Valley, Tennessee, where residents lived in the shadow of both the Smoky Mountains and a government nuclear research facility once known as …
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My poems, "The Day the Woman Shed Her Skin" and "The Frog King," are featured in the Fall/Winter 2014 (34.2-3) issue of The Chattahoochee Review, alongside a review essay by contributing editor Gregg Murray on “Confessionalism and High Modernism in Recent Work by Sampson Starkweather, Mary McMyne, and Okla Elliot." Here's an excerpt: McMyne’s elegant lyricism …
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My review of Elizabeth Robinson's haunting hybrid collection, On Ghosts, is now up at Verse: Elizabeth Robinson’s fourteenth book, On Ghosts, is indeed a haunting collection. Elusive and difficult to characterize, the book contains poems as well as abstract essayistic passages, floating quotations, anecdotes, an e-mail, mathematical formulae, and descriptions of (absent) photographs. In her “Explanatory Note,” Robinson writes that the …
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Tonight, I finished reading Shaindel Beers' second full-length poetry collection, The Children's War and Other Poems (Salt Publishing, 2013). It's a book in two parts about a difficult subject -- the effects of war and violence on children and society at large -- but it's also a book about the healing power of poetry and art. …
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I just finished reading Book of Asters, Sally Rosen Kindred's haunting second collection (Mayapple Press, 2014). The poems in Book of Asters, like the poems in Kindred's first full-length book, No Eden, explore themes of motherhood, grief, and spirituality in beautiful, lyrical language. Many of the poems turn flowers into metaphors for womanhood and desire, exploring the …
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I just finished Small Chimes by my colleague, Julie Brooks Barbour (Aldrich Press, 2014). What a pleasure: it's that rare sort of poetry collection you can pick up and read straight through, cover to cover. There's a narrative, a momentum that pulls you through. I started and couldn't stop. Here is small town life, family life, …
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"Not for the Faint of Heart," my review of Katie Farris' wonderfully strange fairy tale collection, boysgirls, appears in issue 35.1 of American Book Review: Beware: this fairy tale collection will cause readers to sit up straight, to blink, to swallow in fear. Anyone “used to sitting back and eavesdropping, playing the voyeur on the lives of …