Reviews by Erin Murphy
Poetry Editor
Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best
by Jane Zwart
Orison Books, 2026
I started reading these poems right after AWP which always feels like eating cake all day every day for nearly a week. Zwart's work is like an eight-layer Smith Island cake. There is the loss of a brother who died young, concern for children, nods to poets past (Bishop in "Waiting Room," Stevens in "i Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"), illness, aging, pop culture, science, and the natural world – all held together with the icing of exquisite imagery ("subpoenaed by grief," "henna-chinned moon," "petals knuckling into pecans," "wind unwinding its argon sarong"). It occurs to me that I don't know the history of Smith Island cakes. I just looked it up. They date back to the 1800s when women on the island would send them with their watermen husbands during the fall oyster harvest. It's believed the concoctions were meant to remind the men of home and keep them safe. Cake as talisman. While the layers of craft and insight in this rich collection won't shield us from mortality, they do remind us to "stay tender," to duck our heads "inside/ a rolled-down window/ for another kiss/ before life pulls away."
by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth
(paintings by Jenny Walton)
Texas Review Press, 2026
This is not a poetry book. Ceci n'est pas un recueil de poèsie. Which is to say, in the tradition of Magritte, Boys Behind Glass is and is not what it appears to be. Part poetry, part visual art, part anthropological experiment, part cultural study, part pop culture exposé, this brilliant project belongs in MoMA as much as in Barnes and Noble. Heck, it could be featured in People magazine. But what is this "it"? When poet Jennifer Sperry Steinorth met visual artist Jenny Walton at an artist residency nearly a decade ago, Steinorth was struck by Walton's watercolor series "Match/Enemy" which documents her experience on the dating app OK Cupid. In her paintings, Walton recreates profile pictures of men who chose to "obscure, alter, or hide their facial features." Steinorth was inspired to write poetic responses to this "Sears catalog of singles," and the result is a volume of 39 poems and 50+ paintings. In many of the images, the subjects' faces are hidden (behind ski masks, in SCUBA diving suits, or in the case of a repeated image of a man scrubbing a floor — redacted). In others, the faces are replaced by other body parts (hands buttoning shirtsleeve cuffs, tatts, eyes, headless torsos, and lots and lots of crotches — "hard pass" is a phallic-shaped concrete (ha!) poem: "look at/ my boner/ look at my/ boner look/ at my look/ at my look/ at my boner…" There are substitutes (dogs, a clock, toilet paper rolls, a black box) and costumes (Superman and Elvis). In the most confounding, there is the image of a man with another woman, possibly a former love ("can't he see the ashes/ disseminating from their laced silhouettes?"). The watercolors are fascinating in themselves, but Steinorth's poems—which invent a single woman persona imagining the motivations of these men—give the paintings another life, like two pulses that keep their own rhythm but periodically sync up. If, as Steinorth considers, "maybe/ it's not power but plot that defines what's sexy," then her narratives are Sophia Loren in Marriage Italian Style. Likewise, her rhymes titillate and surprise: common/ramen, cadaver/MacGyver, shimmy/vulnerability. And if her craft were in my bed, I wouldn't sleep in the bathtub (see her crown-adjacent sonnets in which a last line begets the next first line — what she does with "marriage" and "miscarriage" is an absolute gut punch). It's important that these are boys, not men, even though they're old enough to vote and enlist. As Steinorth writes in her origin story: "‘Boys' calls to my mind ‘boys will be boys' & bro-culture, but also the innocence of adolescence, the giddiness of new romance, and the vulnerability of the child self." The preposition in 𝘉𝘰𝘺𝘴 𝘉𝘦𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘎𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴 is important, too: "behind" suggests imprisonment behind camera/phone/computer screens as well as impersonalization. The title also suggests "boys under glass," as Steinorth's musings put their self-projected self-images under a microscope. There is a 13-page works cited — "(Some) Texts Digested" — section. But not to worry: you don't need a PhD in BBG to enjoy it. This groundbreaking, genre-bending book is for everyone, even the boys on the apps.
by Molly Fisk
Red Hen Press, 2026
"I am nowhere I have ever been, she thinks, and married." While this opening line of "Half-way" refers to newlywed Phoebe Imlay, it also applies to us, the readers of Molly Fisk's mesmerizing collection, Walking Wheel. The world she creates in this novel-in-verse is nowhere we've been before, either. The linked poems take us along with Phoebe and her new husband, Miles, as they journey in 1875 from their home in central Oregon to California's Surprise Valley. Fisk captures their first year of marriage with breathtaking tenderness. There is a moment when Miles sees Phoebe removing her shoes and stockings: "her small feet/ are planted so firmly on the ground, unshakeable,/ he thinks he could weep." I get it, Miles. I felt myself on the verge of weeping throughout this book. Is it because my youngest daughter is newly married? Because my son is marrying this summer? Because I'm wistfully recalling my own wedding thirty-four years ago? Maybe. But I think it's mostly because Fisk transports us to the wagon ride and rustic cabin, the vistas, the fields, the dust, the shy glances of young love. Meanwhile, she doesn't gloss over the gritty reality, whether it's blood from a butchered rabbit or a menstrual pad. And wow, who knew wagon-era sex could be so steamy! "[H]e is talking to her with his skin and his grip and his hips rocking,/ speeding up, breath harder, palms on her breasts, her hair sweeping/ his face, the sweat rising slick on them both, her voice making a noise/ he's never heard before." I love how she captures the small comforts of routine, as in this scene from "Cradle": "Phoebe rocks, knitting/ another tiny sleeve. They have always known/ how to share silence, if you can call the mad/ chorus of crickets at this hour silence,/ and the hooting of an owl." Yes, we are nowhere we have ever been. But even though 150 years separate us from Phoebe and Miles, we see ourselves in them thanks to Fisk's extraordinary gift for creating compelling narrative and vivid imagery. We may have replaced knitting with Netflix and petticoats with Spanx, but we are still just human beings coexisting in "our little, sturdy/ busy, turning world."
