- 50 Words: Mandy Kahn’s Math, Heaven, Time Mandy Kahn’s Math, Heaven, Time (Eyewear Publishing) has a balmy quality, offering a welcome mat. This collection is smart and extraordinarily accessible, with a surreptitious mysticism. Can’t you hear Rilke in Kahn? Her poems are savory, lucid, accidentally philosophical. It seems they ask us to live more sincerely. Buy the book direct from the author here – for $15, or direct from Eyewear […]
- 50 Words: Rodney Koeneke’s Etruria Rodney Koenke’s Etruria (Wave Books) entranced me with the opener: “Toward a Theory of Translation.” His collection joints the marrow and bone of the quotidian details of love and language with a sort of ancient-futurism. Koeneke charts memory like a cartographer whose instruments were crowd-sourced: his voice is familiar. Buy Etruria from Wave Books. This […]
- 50 Words: Donald Platt’s “Essential Tremor” Donald Platt’s piece, “Essential Tremor” reads like a paternal seismograph. It has a performative patience, but still runs like a rabbit. Poetry typically slows me to a prayer’s crawl – this piece does something of both: it’s a hybrid of breath and speed. The form is arrow-matic, and brightly confessional. To enjoy Platt’s piece, and many others for […]
- Condensed Poetry Reviews in 50 Words (Yes, exactly 50 words.) Since my foray (read: baptism by full immmersion) back into poetry, I have been reading furiously. The last nine months I’ve been submerged in language (by way of advanced conversation courses at the Italian Cultural Institute), re-learning Latin at home, and stacks of contemporary poetry. It is, assuredly, a vast luxury to be surrounded by […]