Review: Trumpets in the Sky by Jerry Garcia Trumpets in the Sky by Jerry Garcia comes back again and again to the wonder of the world when you are focused on the sky. In the preface, he tells us that he has always been fascinated by “things in the sky” (12), which was also the early …
Alexis Rhone Fancher and Cynthia Atkins’s Duets Duets by Alexis Rhone Fancher and Cynthia Atkins is the result of a friendship and collaboration between the two poets. Each of them responded to Fancher’s photography and the result is a collection that captures the anxiety and inward-turning that we, or at least I, have felt over …
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Aruni Wijesinghe’s 2 Revere Place Aruni Wijesinghe’s 2 Revere Place is a collection about the home where the poet spent her early childhood. Like any place wrapped in the memory of childhood, 2 Revere Place for her has a mixture of pain and joy. What we remember, of course, tends to be the very best …
Review of Wherever I’m At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry, Donald G. Evans and Robin Metz, eds. Wherever I’m At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry is the brainchild of Robin Metz, who gathered work for years before cancer finally led him to join forces with and ultimately pass the project on to the poet …
Poetry Review: Nightmares & Miracles by Michelle Bitting Michelle Bitting’s Nightmares & Miracles goes straight into the center of things that matter, but that is not surprising. Bitting is a poet who never wastes our time. She helps us to understand what is magic and horrible in our world as the title of this collection suggests. …
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Mary Meriam’s Pools of June is a book that helps to reshape our concept of mythology so that it serves the people of today. I have always felt that mythology is necessary, but that often is damaging especially when it demonizes people and codifies hatred. Think about the treatment of women in our understanding of …
Like so much of his earlier work, Richard Loranger’s Unit of Agency exposes what is there for us to see if we would just open our eyes and look. He discusses what is dangerous, wrong, and painful in the United States. He shows us how and where corruption has hurt the nation while questioning the …
Among other things, Rob Sturma’s Head v Heart is a discussion of how popular culture can be magic, how it can help those who love it and take it seriously through life’s most difficult times. Sturma, who seems to be about the same age I am and shares many of the same cultural obsessions I …
I met my friend Ken Johnson six or seven years ago at Gallery 57 where he had a one-artist show of his painting and poetry of his experience as a Vietnam War veteran. That night a group of us went out after the show to talk about poetry and art. He told me that one …
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Seize by Brian Komei Dempster is about Dempster’s journey as the father of Brendan, a child with severe disabilities, and it is also about his reevaluations of his world and place in it after he has learned what love and pain is through the lens of fatherhood. Among other medical issues, Brendan suffers from epilepsy, which …
A poetry anthology of New York City by New York City poets is about as ambitious a project as one could take on. The city is filled with exceptional poets who love and write about their hometown. NYC from the Inside is filled with their work and delivers a view into how those who live …
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A Quilt for David by Steven Reigns feels like a sacred book to me. I lived through the AIDS crisis and the disinformation and fear mongering that went along with it. This poetry collection chronicles the difficult story of a dentist, Dr. David Acer, who contracted HIV and continued to practice on patients during the …
Conney Williams’s The Distance of Observation reminds us that love can take us out of the mundanity of the everyday and make life heroic, even mythical. Williams’s newest collection centers around the spiritual, physical, and emotional drama of this emotion and shows us how our lives are destroyed and elevated from it. He speaks of …
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When I first read Rich Ferguson’s Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates, I thought he was only cataloguing what makes life chaotic and difficult. However, it became clear fairly quickly that while he is often discussing the toxic, the painful, and the frightening, where he is best is when he is providing ways through the …
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The wide ranging and devastating effect of toxic masculinity is one of the topics that Carlos Andrés Gómez’s Fractures explores deeply and richly. Gómez is aware of the danger of the violent urges running through him, and he is trying to move past them even as they are often reinforced as virtuous by our society. …
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