July 16, 2023: My review of Betsy Sholl’s If Only A Song Could Save You published in The Maine Sunday Telegram. Read it here, or if you hit the Portland Papers paywall, download it here:
May 1, 2023: My review of Claire Millikin’s Elegiaca Americana published in Hole in the Head Review. Read it here, or if you’d rather download it:
January 15, 2023: My review of Cate Marvin‘s Event Horizon published in The Maine Sunday Telegram.
Poet Cate Marvin, a resident of Scarborough, titled her new collection with a term that astrophysicists use to refer to the edge of a black hole: “Event Horizon.” It’s no surprise, then, that many of these thirty-eight poems churn with the danger of being a woman in a dangerous world. The speaker itemizes her losses. She mourns a beloved mentor. A friend’s ghost visits her at a reading. Another friend has committed suicide. Her romantic relationships and flawed marriages bring turmoil: “I cross the sea of ex-husbands.” Violence abounds: “Bones crack inside a body like glass / in a sack … after a body is flung from / a bed.” (Read more)
November 13, 2022: My review of Jefferson Navicky‘s Antique Densities: Modern Parables and Other Experiments in Short Prose published in The Maine Sunday Telegram.
Whether you call them experiments or parables, stories or prose poems, the narratives in Jefferson Navicky’s “Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose” present odd situations and a plethora of characters yearning for discovery or connection. The book’s “Introduction,” in effect its first prose poem, describes the author’s life-changing moment in a “small, dark bookstore” where he finds the Howard Schwartz anthology “Tales of Wisdom: 100 Modern Parables.” It becomes for him a kind of portal that liberates him from the “restricting realistic prose realm to which I’d been previously confined.” (Read more)
Spring, 2022: My review of These Few Seeds by Meghan Sterling published in The Cafe Review.
How does one justify bringing a child into a world of conflict and impending catastrophe ? This is the question Meghan Sterling takes on in her debut collection, These Few Seeds. Even knowing she can’t help but leave her daughter a troubled legacy, Sterling’s overall message is one of resilience and hope. (Read more)
March 6, 2022: My review of What Rough Beasts by Leslie Moore published in The Maine Sunday Telegram.
Leslie Moore’s “What Rough Beasts” reads like a field notebook transformed into art. With depictions of birds and animals in 40 poems and 29 prints, Moore demonstrates her considerable skills as both poet and visual artist, creating fascinating conversations between image and text. These closely and lovingly observed creatures accompany Moore as teachers and companions on life’s journey. (Read more.)
December 2021: My review of Philomath by Devon Walker-Figueroa’s published in Plume.
The poems in Philomath, Devon Walker-Figueroa’s 2021 National Poetry Series collection, evoke her origins in western Oregon, a landscape suggested in the cover art by Erik Larson, a stark woodcut of tree rings on a decayed stump. As she revisits the farmlands and vineyards of King’s Valley, “a place known for its dead / settlers & Xmas trees” where there exists an entire cemetery of “land-claimers,” Walker-Figueroa mines bits of her childhood and young adulthood—as an infant listening to “the chirr of locusts, their low- / lying electricity in the field,” a seven-year-old “in the last summer / of the cedars’ lives,” or a young teen who “runs through yellow meadows.” A recurrent theme is the pain of losing her mother. The sequencing of individual poems and the often-fragmented style typify Walker-Figueroa’s process of assemblage, pulling together vivid images of experience like dream shards, powerful and haunting. (Read more.)
July 18, 2021: My review of Gretchen Cherington’s memoir, Poetic License published in The Maine Sunday Telegram.
When she was a little girl, Gretchen Cherington, the daughter of poet Richard Eberhart, spent every summer with her family at Undercliff, a Down East cottage in Brooksville, Maine. Her parents loved to host parties and these idyllic summers included a steady parade of visitors drawn from the glitterati of 20th-century American letters – Mary McCarthy, Cal Lowell, Phil Booth, E.B. White, Donald Hall, Walker Evans, Buckminster Fuller, Maxine Kumin.
“Poetry was the music of my childhood,” Cherington writes in her new memoir, “Poetic License,” but “there wasn’t much room for a kid” – either at Undercliff or in the family’s home in Hanover, New Hampshire, where there was usually company for dinner and the spotlight always shone on her father. (Read more.)
January 10, 2021: My review of Deborah Cummins’ Until They Catch Fire published in The Maine Sunday Telegram.
Poet and essayist Deborah Cummins begins her third poetry collection, “Until They Catch Fire,” with an epigraph from memoirist Patricia Hampl: “the dry twigs of a vanished life . . . are rubbed together until they catch fire.” Fire, aptly represented in the gorgeous cover art by Jeffrey Haste, appears in these poems sometimes as flame but mostly as illumination. These 43 poems, many of them responding to the deaths of the poet’s brother and mother, provide a kind of illumination for both speaker and reader. (Read more.)
October 27, 2020: My review of Sonia Greenfield’s Letdown is up at Contemporary Verse 2: The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing:
The word letdown refers to the onset of lactation in mammals, a physiological response that binds mother and child. As Sonia Greenfield writes in poem #36 of her third collection, Letdown, it also means “disillusionment, discouragement or disappointment.” Greenfield builds on these definitions as the narrator confronts both her son’s autism diagnosis and her own loss of fertility. The brilliance of Letdown stems from its unremitting honesty and intimacy as it plumbs the dichotomy of love and loss. (Read more.)
February 7, 2020: My review of David Surette’s Malden is up at Résonance:
David Surette’s Malden is an album full of snapshots from a youth spent in Malden, Massachusetts. The album’s cover aptly portrays a young and grinning hockey player, Surette himself, number 8 on the Malden hockey team. The eight hockey poems provide a framework for the collection’s exploration of growing up in a working-class neighborhood.
Uncle Eddie, “a sensation at Malden High in those days / before Bobby Orr,” inspired the young Surette to try the sport (“We Called My Father’s Friends Uncle”). Even in the off-season the speaker and his friends play street hockey as the “Old Men” push lawn mowers or chase the boys away from the fronts of their houses. Surette creates the sounds of the boys’ play (“thwack of our sticks / and shouts of Shoot! I’m open!”) and the old men on the porch listening to “the soundtrack of our lives,” the Red Sox game. more
January 3, 2020: My review of Dorianne Laux’s Only as the Day is Long is up at the Rumpus:
Dorianne Laux’s new book, Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems, traces a path of lifelong losses. Beginning with a selection of poems from five earlier collections—Awake, What We Carry, Smoke, Facts About the Moon, and The Book of Men—the book leads with a sense of inevitability to the twenty new poems written in response to the death of Laux’s mother, poems that acknowledge the ambivalence of a complicated relationship even while they eulogize.
This was a mother who failed to intervene between father and children in a violent household. The book’s initial poems confront that brutal childhood trauma—the beating of a sister in “Two Pictures of My Sister” and the speaker’s sexual abuse in “I Have Always Done What Was Asked.” Childhood terrors are itemized in “Fear,” including “the soundless swing of the father’s ringed / fist, the mother’s face turned away.” In “Tooth Fairy” the speaker tries to reconcile the sparkling quarter left under her pillow with other memories:
… palms
curled into fists, a floor
of broken dishes, her chain-smoking
through the long silences, him
punching holes in the walls. more
October 12. 2019: My review of Mike Bove’s Big LIttle City is up at The Cafe Review:
Mike Bove’s Big Little City offers a heartfelt and detailed portrait of Portland, Maine, the author’s city of origin. The speaker of these detailed poems excavates personal memory and history as he struggles to chart his own path. Bove’s repeated map-making metaphor and his contemplative diction help create the sense of exploration — a meditative walk through the city he loves.
Each of the four sections opens with a short poem titled “Cartography in Retrospect,” marking four steps in the narrator’s coming of age. In the first cartography poem, the speaker uses his “father’s cracked map to walk a line” but gets lost when a marsh comes up in the dark. He curses his father, but continues on his difficult way. Bove’s ruminative style is evident in this first poem: “I can think of several wrong ways to draw a map. / All it takes is one slack stride for regret (bitter muse) / to set down coordinates with pinprick precision.” more
June 1, 2019: My review of Michelle Menting’s Leaves Surface Like Skin is up at The Adirondack Review:
The poems in Michelle Menting’s Leaves Surface Like Skin teem with careful observations of nature. While the title suggests that the natural world is an integral part of the human organism, the gorgeous cover art, by Christine F. Higgins, presents frozen-looking leaves and vines in the top three-quarters and warm roots in the bottom quarter, two realities divided by a permeable boundary. Both are apt representations of this collection’s central theme: boundaries—whether between human and nature, between human and human, or between memory and truth—are meant to be crossed.
In these pairings of humans and other organisms, humans seem unaware that they are meeting their equals. In the opening poem, “To Skin Bare,” someone is stripping the lichen-covered bark from a tree in the forest. In a kind of reverse-Daphne myth, the tree’s surface becomes “the skin of this other thing”— a human. The process of stripping—“like peeling scabs // not yours, a friend’s, a stranger’s”—is an act of violence, but the human “you” of the poem is only “almost” aware of committing this “compelled intrusion.” In “Upon Learning about Tardigrades from Wikipedia,” the poet conflates the microscopic Tardigrades with people, suggesting that humans, too, are parasites “dining on parasites.” (Read more.)
December 15, 2018: My review of Lisa Bellamy’s The Northway is up at The Collagist:
Lisa Bellamy is an animal-lover, a rebel, and quite possibly a Buddhist. Her first full-length collection, The Northway, though fully grounded in tangible experience, manages to transcend the purely physical by means of numerous animal spirit-guides. She has created a sometimes tender, often brash speaker who embraces both the unknown and every step of the journey she limns in these energetic and imaginative poems.
“Life as Lucy,” which leads off the fourth and final section of The Northway, is the poet’s evocation of her brave speaker. When Lisa is renamed “Lucy” by the hard-of-hearing Bernice, the speaker recognizes herself immediately as “an eager dog off the leash.” She celebrates her new identity: “There’s nothing soft or vague about Lucy.”She becomes a “dachshund digging” for “tasty mole scraps.” This is an example of Bellamy’s humor, to be sure, but it is also a moment of self-creation. Whimsical and exuberant, Lucy preaches defiance. . . more
November 1, 2018: My review of Paige Riehl’s Suspension is up at Connotation Press:
Like most of us, the narrator of the poems in Paige Riehl’s Suspension plays multiple roles: she is daughter, granddaughter, friend, wife. However, with eight of the forty-five poems in Suspension directly addressing the adoption of her Korean-born daughter, the role of mother takes a central position in Riehl’s collection.
The title poem, well-placed at the collection’s epicenter, offers a meditation on waiting for the adopted daughter. Here the word “suspension” connotes the enforced waiting period of international adoption, and the poem, spread as it is over three-and-a-half pages, suggests the length and uncertainty of this time. . . more
