by Peter Balakian | Mar 20, 2023 | Reviews
The January 6 Select Congressional Committee released its final report on December 22, 2022. The report is the culmination of the ten hearings the nation has witnessed on television from June through December at intervals. The hearings have had a dramatic impact on...
by David Blair | Nov 21, 2022 | Reviews
The King’s TouchTom SleighGraywolf Press 2022 For years, Tom Sleigh was a Boston poet, a Cambridge poet, and he made poems that seemed associated with the interpretive and bookish spirit of those places, writing poems that were deeply and kaleidoscopically...
by Sarah Emily Duff | Oct 21, 2022 | Reviews
The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: An Epic in Three CantosSylvie KandéTranslated by Alexander DickowWesleyan University Press, 2022 Sylvie Kandé’s epic poem, The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore, describes two journeys over water from the west coast of...
by Clayton Bradshaw | Sep 22, 2022 | Reviews
Maybe the Land Sings BackBy Jan LaPerleGalileo Books, 2022 Jan LaPerle’s latest poetry collection, Maybe the Land Sings Back, begins and is interspersed with sheet music for Charles Wesley’s 1739 hymn “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing.” The words are omitted, which is...
by Gretchen Ayoub | Sep 8, 2022 | Reviews
Cartography: Navigating a Year in IraqKatherine SchifaniPotomac Books, June 2022 The year is 2011, the United States is in the final stages of its two-year withdrawal from Iraq, and Katherine Schifani has been deployed with the US army as the head logistics advisor...
by Milica Mijatović | Aug 26, 2022 | Reviews
Fajront u SarajevuDr Nele KarajlićLaguna, 2015 Often when people hear the name “Yugoslavia,” they recognize it because of the war, or wars, of the 1990s. Another case of Communism, of ethnic and religious hate, of destruction. So much so that even I, a product and...
by Heidi Hart | Aug 8, 2022 | Reviews
Flight and Metamorphosis: PoemsNelly SachsTranslated by Joshua Weiner with Linda B. ParshallFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022 Although I am usually wary of presentism, the too-easy application of historical situations to current contexts, I find that Joshua Weiner’s new...
by Lawrence Rosenwald | Jul 22, 2022 | Reviews
My DeniversityMark PawlakMadHat Press, 2021 On the back cover of My Deniversity, Mark Pawlak’s memoir of his long apprenticeship in poetry to Denise Levertov, the novelist and critic Askold Melnyczuk compares the book to Pound’s ABC of Reading and Rilke’s Letters to a...
by Robert Edwards | Jun 21, 2022 | Reviews
PresidentDirected by: Camilla NielssonRelease Date: 2021 How bad was life in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, the brutal kleptocrat who held power in that sorrowful nation for almost forty years? This bad: When the British mercenary Simon Mann tried to break out of...
by Jacquelyn Pope | Jun 7, 2022 | Reviews
No SignPeter BalakianUniversity of Chicago Press, 2022 In his ninth collection, Pulitzer-prize winning poet Peter Balakian grapples with the anxiety and loss endemic to our time. While the poems respond to recent events, they should not necessarily be viewed as...
