Reviews by Erin Murphy
Poetry Editor
by Tina Schumann
Moon City Press, 2025
I read Tina Schumann's Boneyard Heresies the week I learned a good friend was moving into assisted living. These lines from "A World of Want" hit me hard: "You think your life will go on/ like this forever—weekly trips/ to the garbage bin, untangling/ the green snake of hose between the ferns/ and the delphiniums, the coral bells/ leaning their long necks/ against the back fence." My friend is a gardener. I keep picturing him cooped up inside with no flowers to tend. I barely know a delphinium from a dolphin, but I do know what it means to feel your life contracting. When my widowed mother-in-law downsized to a small apartment with one cabinet for dishes, she had a hard time parting with the 50+ mugs she'd accumulated. These weren't special mugs, mind you. They were giveaways from banks, libraries, and radio stations. One had the cliché cat clinging to a tree: "Hang in there—it's almost Friday." But you would have thought she was sacrificing precious family heirlooms. It wasn't about the mugs, of course. It was about losing agency. First you give up dishes. Next: driving. Then—well, no one wants to think about what's next. Throughout Boneyard Heresies, Schumann brings us face to face with mortality. But she does so with self-deprecating humor and a meta-awareness (see the Self Portrait poems) that provide both intimacy and emotional distance. In "Abecedarian Looking at Sixty," the speaker is "kind of afraid of dying—kind of not" but also exclaims "For fuck's sake! The future is fictitious." One of my favorite poems is "Why I Read the Obits" (and not just because I used to write obituaries for a living and also love reading them). She takes us from death's "reductionist tendencies" to this admission: "I just want to get high/ on the existential/ serotonin relief that comes/ with not being dead." This is at once funny and profound, like so many of the poems in this marvelous collection.
by Elizabeth Bradfield
Persea Books, 2025
We think of the ocean as lulling. We design sound machines around the white noise of waves. We sing "My Bonnie" to babies. While most of the poems in SOFAR are set in or near the sea, Elizabeth Bradfield does not rock us gently to sleep with these lyrics. Instead, she is the master of interruption, creating scattershot dialogue (is that really they/ must be so where are they going can/ you imagine) and stopping mid-sentence: "Sometimes I—ahh, fuck it. Listen. We were fooling/ ourselves, even then." But as often as Bradfield disorients, she also orients, with helpful epigraphs and notes ("Errata" is glacially deposited rock, a "dog-watch" is a short shift on a ship, and the book's title is an acronym for the Sound Fixing and Ranging channel). These are poems about language at play with physicality—the environment and the human body. Bradfield is a deep-sea diver plumbing word roots, seascapes, and literal and figurative landscapes, leading us from cusk eels to the early years of the AIDS epidemic within a few stanzas. And even though the poems aren't lullabies, they are musical. Take "Cleat" which offers one-stop shopping for a prosody lesson:
The first time I held a wrist-fat multistrand line
and flopped it down (cross tuck cross)
over a shin-long cleat
the sense of motion, pattern, right-doing
was almost sexual—as different
from the thumb-thick rope
I'd used until then as a parent's
sweet peck is from a lover's mouth.
(Appropriately, when I typed "cleat," Autocorrect changed it to "clit.") Each poem in SOFAR is equal parts eco and echo, with science and memory bouncing off each other like sonar. In the ars poetica "Tender," Bradfield writes, "What/ can I tend? Attendant, I offer/ not money (coin for care)/ but notice, regard. Tension/ of gaze, unwavering." No matter the object of Bradfield's gaze—the marine world, queer desire, a coyote's penis—she finds poetry in this tension and attention. I'm eager to see what she tends next.
by Yamini Pathak
Milk and Cake Press, 2025
I read this book during the early days of the siege on Minneapolis. I say "early" because there appears to be no end in sight. And so certain poems were inflected by reports of federal agents going door to door arresting people. Dragging them from their homes barely clothed. Tackling them on the street. Killing them. In "पकड़ Pakad" (a Hindi word for a musical phrase that also means "hold, catch, capture, cling, preserve, protect"), the speaker confronts stereotypes: "We were taught our languages were crude," "We were convinced our table manners were savage," "We grew to despise our sun-cooked skins." The result is not shame but persistence: "Our pre-dawn ragas still dark-threaded still/ throb with the sweet/ wet of morning." In the seven-part poem "Mirch Masala," Pathak writes, "Recently, I learned that a secondary meaning of my name is turmeric. The primary meaning of/my name is night. Not everybody loves the dark." The title of the collection comes from a line in "Ode to My Mother's Mouth": "My mother's mouth: a palace/ of lamps. In her hall of benevolent/ mirrors my reflection is dancing," a suggestion that like her mother, she will not be silenced. We see this first-hand in "In My Own Skin" in which the speaker takes on the corporate world in ferocious style: "I ride in/ on a muscled tiger... my chandeliered earrings/ pendulum, my nose stud, a red/ planet casting light on the dark planes/ of my face./ My three sets of biceps flex, at the ready/ (multi-tasking, baby!)" I recommend reading this collection start to finish, rather than skipping around, as the stories, cultural references, language, and lived experience build along the way. These poems mourn loss—of loved ones and customs—but also celebrate what remains in stunning images of kerosine-lit ghost stories, spices that startle the lips, and a body combusting in perimenopause. I found myself returning to these lines from "[Prelude]": "We drink and drink song until we can swallow no more. Until/ shadow swells to become song." I hope Pathak has many more songs to sing. We need them.
by Cal Freeman
Cornerstone Press, 2025
What is "verve" in poetry? Asking for a friend. Okay, asking for myself. A poet I admire once described my poetry as having verve, and I kind of knew what he meant...and I kind of didn't. Yet now I find myself wanting to say Cal Freeman's poems have verve. Only I want to exclaim it: Cal Freeman's poems have verve! So I'm going to try to figure out what I mean as I think through his latest book, The Weather of Our Names. People with verve are spirited and enthusiastic. I think this translates to poetry in pacing and momentum which are often propelled by colloquialism, humor, and/or tonal range. Vervy poems—let's just call them that—are marked by linguistic play and association, with one image sparking the next. Personal experience, philosophy, and pop culture can share the same breath. They're frequently self-referential, as in "Spangle/ blue eyes, this wine glass, spangle because ‘coruscate'/ sounds too strange and arcane, even for a poem/ of mine." Punctuation—or lack thereof—and repetition can contribute to the poem's energy. Example: "Dichotomy Paradox as Non-Fungible Token," the title of which telegraphs the tone, uses anaphora ("I want...") to take us from general malaise to possums to rumination on a father which then leads to a flower: "I want my father back./ I want a different father with the same tastes/ and the same loves. I want a different flower/ than what blooms in the boxwood hedges/ without germination." Some of the verviest poems in this collection are the nine alleged Yelp reviews of restaurants and taverns: "Yelping the Huron River Inn," "Yelping Heck's Bar," "Yelping Portofino Restaurant," etc. (AutoCorrect wants to change verviest to nerviest. Maybe vervy poems are nervy? And now it wants to change vervy to very. Vervy poems are very nervy.) I say "alleged" because these are not, of course, actual reviews. They're meditations on memories and connections he associates with the establishments. "Yelping the Waterfront" is about a Detroit-area restaurant, but it also mentions Aristotle and Archimedes' buoyancy principle and international borders and ends with this image: "I think about the phone my wife dropped from a boat/ in Lake Erie and wonder about its final ping/ as I text her a picture of the moon above the water." I have in mind to give my students a "Yelping" prompt as an "after" poem assignment. How cool would that be? I first encountered Freeman's work when I published his poem "Elegy for Uncle Christopher" in the anthology The Book of Jobs: Poems About Work (available free online). That poem, too, is set in a bar, the Pink Pony in Mackinac, Michigan. Check it out. And check out the very vervy, nervy The Weather of Our Names.
by Francine Witte
Cervena Barva Press, 2025
Sometimes I wonder if a poem set in a particular place and time can transcend nostalgia. And then I read Francine Witte's "Pizza Hut, 1990" and realize it absolutely can. This is not a poem aimed only at those of us who remember the red booths & checkered tablecloths, the early 90s, and the first Gulf War. It goes beyond triggering my own memory of the time my husband, in the throes of parenting toddlers, picked up a pepperoni pie from Pizza Hut and said to the cashier, "Nighty night" as if tucking him into bed. The poem sets the scene with a mood of sounds—"rain stutter," "waitress stacatto," "fizzing" sodas—and then takes a surprising turn when we realize the speaker is not thinking about weather or restaurants but heartbreak as she implores the rain to fall "in one steady stream, like a river...[l]ike a man who doesn't love me/ anymore." This is Witte's gift throughout Some Distant Pin of Light: making the ordinary extraordinary. She does so by creating razor-sharp images—like the TV host in "Home Shopping" who is "a piano of teeth and a candle of eyes"—and then swerving in an unexpected direction, the infomercial amethyst becoming stars on a summer night under which the speaker lies "on a blanket with some boyfriend or other." The tone is frequently at once humorous and poignant, as in "Supermarket, 11 AM" where we go from the cereal aisle to dating: "[I] examine/ calories per serving, total carbs, and realize/ this is more than I ever thought about when/ choosing a boy to take home." There are stunning ekphrastic and persona poems and poems featuring non-human creatures, many of which—like Witte's fiction—dwell in the surreal. One of my favorites is "If I Turn Animal" which reads like a midlife poem version of Rachel Yoder's novel Nightbitch. The speaker contemplates turning "all fang-y and hungernose," with "tooth and claw [her] only words" and ends with the image of a river "lapping softly like a tongue—the tongue of an animal/ settling onto the forest floor, content after a kill." Ultimately, Some Distant Pin of Light is about making peace with life choices and disappointments and longings and yes, even rage. What's that cliche? "It's the journey, not the destination." Witte focuses on both, offering brilliant witness and wisdom as she invites us along for the ride.
by Robbi Nester
Shanti Arts Publishing, 2025
My son has an ambient music radio show, which is perfect for writing and thinking. I listen to it on headphones at the gym because it drowns out the noise and helps me focus on ideas for poems, teaching—even reviews. Robbi Nester opens her poem "Summer, Sheltering in Place" with the experience of a proto-drone effect: "When I was small, I used to wake before the sun/ to sit in the still-dark living room, turn on the T.V.,/ and bathe in the test pattern's bright glow." (If you're under 40, google "test pattern.") About to Disappear is a collection of ekphrastic poems, most of which are accompanied by the image on which they're based. Nester's engagement with the art is similar to bathing in the television screen and listening to ambient music: she immerses herself in its hum, which frees her to explore ideas beyond the frame. While I love seeing the artworks—and feel serious agita reading the acknowledgments, having just completed the permissions from hell for an edited anthology—I don't think the book needs these visuals. This is perhaps the ultimate compliment for ekphrastic poems: they stand on their own. AutoCorrect changed "ekphrastic" to "emphatic," which is not at all the case—these poems are quietly wise, not loudly insistent. Take, for example, "Still Standing" (based on David Graeme Baker's painting "Ivy and Winslow") which moves gently from a teacher at a blackboard to a school shooting:
...She probes a past
she doesn't really know, like a scientist who
studies creatures making their own cold light
in the deepest ocean, dreams and dreams again
about this ruined room, its light and shadows,
settled dust, compelled to paint it in bright hues,
to return and make this place a kind of shrine,
I suppose almost every ekphrastic poem can be read as ars poetica, so it's no surprise that many of the poems in About to Disappear shine a light on artistic process. "The Burning" details J.M.W. Turner's last-minute decision to set the buildings ablaze in "The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1934." The poem ends with "In the gallery, onlookers observed/ as it took shape, a pattern/ of un-being, picture of flux." Maybe a state of flux is what we need in order to create. Maybe we get there through ambient music, test patterns, or ekphrasis. Maybe we get there by reading this ambitious, engaging collection.
by Allison Blevins
Seven Kitchens Press, 2025
Gotta admit I did not expect a poetry chapbook to open with a quote from Khloe Kardashian. But dang, "I love hard" does sum up this fierce collection by Allison Blevins. I should have suspected from the title—"Keeping Up"—that these prose poems would allude to the infamous influencers. This is no mere spin-off, though. It's a high-brow, low-brow see-saw. The springboards alternate between episodes of "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" and fine art, ekphrasis at its most inclusive. Do I mix my metaphors? Very well then, I mix my metaphors. It's fitting for a book that merges memories of current and former loves, sassiness ("I hope all my exes are afraid of what I'll write, of who might read."), mental health, mortality, parenting, and desire in twenty pages, a superhighway cul-de-sac. We talk about economy of language in poetry -- expressing large ideas with the fewest possible words. Blevins is the Empress of Economy, the Ebenezer Scrooge of squeezing meaning out of airtight lines. Take this single sentence from "People Are More Beautiful Than They Think": "Nights at twenty-five, I'd drive the eight lane interstate home high, forget to open my eyes, miles of Oregon green landscape, the long blink, the blackness between there and home." And oh, those sounds! Nights/ five/ I'd/ drive/ high/ eyes/ miles. That is some kick-ass…onance. From the title poem: "How grotesque it is to live in flesh. I'm in love with the flawless screen, with flashing teeth." But that's only a half-truth. "Keeping Up" is a Dolce & Gabbana juicer (Google it!) pulverizing all the beauty and damage that make us human. I devoured it.
