Reviews by Erin Murphy
Poetry Editor
Psychic Party Under a Bottle Tree
by Jennifer Martelli
Lily Poetry Review, 2024
At the end of "Bryant Park Farmer's Market," the speaker says: "Bins of gold winter fruit. Lavender, dried and/ sober. I want to stay here, folded, shameless." The word "sober" is key here because this is a book about addiction and sobriety. But I want to focus on "shameless" (the word, not the TV series). How have I gone my entire life without realizing that shameless means both exhibiting shameful behavior and living free of shame? That it should be a compliment not an insult? It's appropriate that I'm asking questions because this fierce and important collection is full of them: questions about the creative process ("Do politics belong in a poem?" "Does forgiveness belong in art?"), about spirituality ("Do you, too, live an un-prayerful life?"), about ethics ("Shall I eat this meat after years of not?"). The title poem ends with a series of questions: "Will we sleep?/ Ever at all? Without nightmares or dreams?" [For her answer to the politics question, see, for starters, "Raising My Son in the Time of Pence."] This collection has one of the best poem openings I've ever read (in "August"): "I confess to you now, I spy on the people I believe/ rejected me. Which means, I spy on the whole world..." It also captures the most important question of "Psychic Party Under a Bottle Tree": how do we survive abandonment? Maybe we start by thinking of shameless as a virtue, not a sin. (In memory of Jennifer Martelli, 1962-2025).
by Shannon K. Winston
Glass Lyre Press, 2025
A bartender at our favorite local tavern gave each customer a worry doll recently. She didn't explain why—she just went from table to table placing tiny woven dolls in our palms. Little did I know that soon after, I'd read this stunning book (with an equally stunning cover image by Megan Merchant). These are poems about anxiety, but more importantly, they are poems about representing anxiety. I was struck by the significance of the prefix "un" in this collection (as in "not" or "the opposite of"). "Undoing Third-Degree Burns" is an untelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth—an undoing of their undoing. Reflecting on her own premature birth, the speaker says "undo me, unwish me, unmake me." Throughout the collection, things unfold, unfurl, unleash, unstitch, and can't be unseen. They are unruly, unsteady, unsettled, uncertain, unable, unknown, and unnamed. The rhetorical term litotes refers to a positive that is expressed through a negative, usually for stress or irony. (Example: If you say "I'm not unhappy" it's different from saying you're happy.) I'd argue that "un" in "The Worry Dolls" functions as litotes. The speaker is not unanxious, but in articulating her anxiety and its possible origin story, she mitigates it (sometimes with sharp humor, as in "Every Day My Mother Calls to Tell Me about Things that Might Kill Me" or the one-sentence poem, "On Curing Anxiety."). For those who haven't experienced anxiety, there are poems that are excellent primers: "Worry is a Dress Rehearsal," the list poem "Every Day the Girl Prepares for Death," and a series of panic attack fugues. For those fluent in anxiety, this stunning collection will provide reassurance that you're not alone. You're unalone.
by Liv Mammone
Game Over Books, 2025
I read this outstanding debut collection just as my physical therapist daughter began treating a man who had suddenly lost his vision in his early 60s. My daughter is imagining the world through his body. I found myself imagining the world through the speaker's body in Fire in the Waiting Room. But this book isn't only about her body. It's about any body that has been othered. It's sometimes searing (see "Surgery Psalm" in which doctors discuss "their weekends over the red rind/ of your exposed spine"), sometimes witty (see "Vagina Resigning"), and always profound.
by Susan Michele Coronel
Finishing Line Press, 2025
What came first: the loveless marriage, the father seeking pleasure in prostitutes and porn, or the brother's rare genetic condition and death? And when in this narrative did the daughter start referring to herself as Daughter? The brilliance of In the Needle, A Woman is the way Coronel expands, contracts, and reweaves time so that all of these things seem to happen concurrently. The parents are distanced from each other even before they meet. The brother is dying before he's born and yet reverse ages back to the womb. And the speaker is Daughter even when she has her own daughters. Anyone seeking comfort in the linear trajectory from trauma to healing won't find it in these pages. Yet somehow it's the very reckoning with these narratives that offers hope. At one point the speaker asks her daughters "Of what are you made?/ Of what are you brave?" If she were to answer these questions herself, I believe she'd say "Everything. Everything."
night myths ** before the body
by Abi Pollokoff
Red Hen Press, 2025
Moons ago when I was a UMass MFA student studying with Jim Tate, I accompanied my not-yet-husband to an academic conference in Florida. Much to my surprise, I saw on the program that Jim was the keynote speaker. At 9 AM (very early for Jim—IYKYK), he was reading poetry before a hotel ballroom full of business-attired faculty. After his reading, an audience member raised her hand and asked, "What did you mean when you wrote [quoting a line from one of the poems]?" Jim just shrugged and said, "How the hell should I know? I just wrote the damn thing. I don't know what it means." I think about this every time I'm asked (or tempted) to explain a poem. Sure, lit theory reader response, the author is dead, blah blah blah. But I love the simplicity of Jim's answer. That said, I also love the very detailed notes Abi Pollokoff provides at the end of night myths ** before the body. I don't usually recommend reading notes before the poems, but I'd make an exception for this book. I was particularly interested in her description of poems set apart from others—"cousin-poems," she calls them. Some of the other notes would be useful for poets seeking prompts for their own poems. She tells us, for example, that her poem "particular reminders when prayers for the body aren't enough" originated during a visit to an art gallery during which she "sat on the wood floor and spent a series of five to ten minutes facing each wall." The word "body" appears—by my count—at least fiftt times in this book. It is the body as body, the body in contrast to not-body, the body as concept, and the body as word. In "to forest is to hide a woman," she writes: "i have this. body & they tell me. it is. it is the body of a/ woman they tell. me it is the body. of woman but they/ do not. tell me how. to woman. they tell me how. Do/ you do how. do you woman. or you. how/ do i." I'm interested in how the period (that word, I know) functions here, how it makes you read the antecedents and succedents as continuations of each phrase. And yet the hard stop also makes you pause to consider each fragment. What does it mean "to woman"? Woman as verb, woman as infinitive. You'll want to spend at least five to ten minutes facing each wall, each page, of this extraordinary book to see what you discover.
by Kelly Fordon
SFA Press, 2025
Last fall our daughter who lives in New Zealand published a collection of essays that tells the stories of adult male survivors of child sexual abuse. That book, Coming in From the Cold/ TAUTOKO TĀNE AOTEAROA and What Trammels the Heart are excellent companions. Confession: I had to look up "trammel." Without realizing it, I'd always thought of it as a synonym for "trample." But it actually means to confine or enmesh. The book's title comes from a line in Fordon's poem "Stone Enclosure: A Ghazal": "What trammels the heart—tamps it/ into grit and pulverized stone?" It's the perfect title because the entire collection interrogates what hardens our hearts. Confession #2: I'm hesitant to use the word "confession" because it conjures the church at the root of the abuse and shame captured so vividly in these poems. As Fordon writes, "I can hear the faithful/ booing as I push these words out like slugs." A brave and haunting collection, What Trammels the Heart ends on a note of hope: "…maybe I'll bury my bitterness/ in the middle of the prairie.// Maybe it will transmogrify./ Maybe it will feed me." I'm so glad this book and my daughter's book were written. I'm so sorry they had to be written.
by Cindy Veach
Moonpath Press, 2025
It would be easy to pigeonhole Monster Galaxy as a book about grief (for a father, a brother, and also a mother lost to dementia), with cameos by pop culture icons: Penny from Lost in Space, Twiggy, Cher, Morticia from the Addams Family, Elvis. And Allen Ginsburg takes a nap in the speaker's childhood bed! But at its heart, this is a powerful book about outside vs. inside, about the strictures imposed on us by others (family, culture) vs. those we impose on ourselves. "Is there a woman inside every monster or monsters/ inside every woman?" Veach asks in "The Woman Who Swallowed a Python." In another poem she writes: "When I was a girl/ alone in the dankness of our basement/ I pushed a pussy willow catkin up my nose/ to see if it would fit. No, I pushed myself/ into the furred bud to see if I would fit." The ultimate inside monster is the specter of the "good girl." The end of "Algaecwif" (a poem inspired by Susan Rich's poem "Boketto") becomes the book's title: "I have tried to be good, to exist between the lines/ yet look at me, my galaxy of monsters." Yes, let's look at her, at her monsters, at her brilliant lines. Then let's look at ourselves.
by Barbara Ungar
The Word Works, 2024
"Humans comprise a mere hundredth/ of a hundredth of the living, .01%," Ungar writes in "Weight." Later, in "Average Monkey," she informs us "We've made a billion elephants'/ worth of plastic." In this significant—and gorgeous—contribution to the field of ecopoetics, Ungar toggles between the macro and the micro, erasing the distance between the two. I never thought I'd love a poem about a slug, but here we are. "My Head and I" takes us from the sea slug (elysia marginata) to Ann Boleyn to a science lesson ("A gland in the slug's head stores/ chloroplasts from algae to keep it alive/ by photosynthesis, while a new body/ grows like a leaf from the cut neck./ The new heart starts beating in a week.") to the speaker's dream of hanging her own head "like a purse" on the hook of a bathroom stall. It's a poem about identity that echoes back to the book's opening poem which asks "What are you?" That's the ultimate question, isn't it? What are we, we who have squandered everything we've been bestowed? There are so many lines in this book that could be on bumper stickers or billboards, not because they're cheesy but because they're so concisely profound. (Examples: From "As If,": "Daylight doesn't need saving./ We need daylight to save/ us." From "Peri-Apocalypse Now": "Fuck reality, back to the movie." From "Luck": "Where on earth is not ploughed/ with someone else's bones?") In "Kintsugi for Aunt Vera," a beloved teacup is shattered thanks to a caroming cat (something I can relate to as servant to 3 Siamese). The speaker contemplates sending it to Japan (the cup, not the cat) or finding someone closer who "knows how to mend precious pottery with gold/ to make it even more exquisite." If only the art of Kintsugi could save our broken planet.
by Melissa Eleftherion
Querencia Press, 2024
Melissa Eleftherion dedicates "gutter rainbows" to teens everywhere. As the parent to four former teens, auntie to two current teens, and a once-teen poet who rarely saw myself reflected in poems, I love this. These aren't PG poems by any means. They are candid scenes you won't see in an after-school special. There's bullying (by, not of, the speaker), the objectification of young women ("the curdling gawk & greased/ taunts"), an intimated abortion, and molestation. There's also the view from 30,000 feet—or 30 years—which is wisdom I want my niece to read. Example: "the interiority of female misogyny" begins with a catalog of teen delinquency (setting fires, graffitiing subway cars) followed by an admission: "i lied/ it all hurt." In this Coney Island of a teen girl's mind, the amusement park is a backdrop for gorgeous, gritty images of adolescence: the "whir & candy" where "you… put your feelings/ between the boardwalk slats." Like the teens who are at once jaded and naïve, these poems contain sharp contrasts: calla lilies and cigarettes, hummingbirds and Prince songs. Yes, they "contain multitudes," which even the speaker acknowledges in section three where geology becomes a metaphor for transformation and self-awareness. (In "chalcedony," "...the glow extends to us despite our faults." In "rose quartz," the stone is an "aureole threshold" and "a bubblegum center.") From the final poem in gutter rainbows: "her story is my story is your story." THIS.
by Erica Reid
Autumn House Press, 2024
You could read this book as a how-to guide for writing forms: sestina, golden shovel, sonnet crown, ghazal, among others. But don't be fooled. These are not poems trying on different outfits; the poems drive the forms, not the other way around. I love the tonal range: one minute you're punched in the gut and the next, you're smiling. Take this excerpt from "Five-Story House": "I never had a bedroom at my father's house. For a time, before he remarried, he laid a mattress on the floor & it was mine. When he built his own house, it had a room for my brother, another for my sister, another for my stepmom's treadmill." Diane Seuss is right: "Now and then, a rough upbringing and its consequent emptiness can incite a rare capacity for seeing and chronicling what is." Ghost Man on Second is that rare book, Erica Reid that rare poet.
by Marjorie Maddox
Wildhouse Publishing, 2025
These are poems about mothers and daughters, mental illness, abuse, aging, memory loss, and caregiving. But it's not the "what" of these poems that interests me most—it's the "how," how within a single poem Maddox tells and retells a narrative until it becomes about the telling itself. "Story Retold as Half Troilet" begins with "On Mother's Day, she jumps out of the car./ The traffic swerves and brakes." The brakes become a broken family, a car becomes a scar, the she becomes they as the poem hurtles toward the final line, a question: "Will they survive?" The answer is yes, thanks to faith and art—and faith in art. "Ode to Daughter as Artist," ends with "in an ordinary room,/ on an ordinary day: art &/ its dizzying versions of birth." Each poem in Seeing Things is a brilliant, dizzying version of birth (and rebirth) that dares to offer: "Take, read; this is my story."
by Patricia Clark
Madville Publishing, 2025
I just learned about wind phones recently. We have one at a park walking distance from our house. You lift the receiver of the disconnected phone and communicate with lost loved ones, sending your words and grief into the wind. You could say Clark's poem "The Wind Phone" is a synecdoche for the entire collection. You could say this entire collection is a message in a wind phone, honoring and processing the loss (or imminent loss) of the people, everyday joys, and natural world we've known. In "What My Father Wished For," a father near the end of his life says, "I've had everything in this life I could have wanted." I feel the same way about this book. How lucky we are that it was written.
by Emily Patterson
Bottlecap Press, 2024
This chapbook of haiku was the shortest collection with the shortest poems that I've read recently. But it took me the longest to read! That's because I can't read one haiku after another. I need to read, stop, do something else like take out the garbage while thinking about the haiku, then return to reading. For example, "haiku at 1:51 p.m.": "You breathe with the leaves/ as roots offer me a seat./ Each of us, held." I consider the pronouns in this poem, how we go from you to me to us. Then I think about tree roots and family roots. I notice that last line seems at first like a simple observation but is actually a wish for everyone to feel nurtured and supported while simultaneously a sad acknowledgment that this isn't the case. As I'm brushing my teeth, the poem makes me think of the "word gap" study that found children in low-income families hear thousands fewer words spoken to them per day vs. those in higher-income families, translating to millions fewer by the time they start school. I think of how this gap will likely increase with cuts to safety nets. So many children not being held. Then I reread the poem and dwell on the comma in the last line, how it suggests that both the speaker and the tree are "held," as in valued, a commentary on our place in the natural world. And then I move on to Patterson's next poem. Reading this stunning collection may take you 20 minutes or a lifetime. Either way, it's worth it.
by Danèlle Lejeune
Finishing Line Press, 2025
Those of us born in early summer got a raw deal with our sun sign's name: Cancer. I mean, there's no Diabetes or Flesh Eating Bacteria sign. Sheesh. So as a moon child, I was drawn to "Cancer: Daily Horoscope for Summer Solstice," a poem that toggles between astrology, science, and daily observations. This poem is representative of the way Lejeune splices the personal and environmental, creating fissures in expected narratives. While the poems in this chapbook aren't funny exactly, the linguistic play will make you smile (see "Calculation: Waiting for Gödel" and "Scientists Found Ripples in Space and Time And You Have to Buy Groceries"). Mostly, though, Lejeune creates a certain mood. "Anthroposcenic" isn't a word, but it should be, and it perfectly describes this compelling collection.
by Megan Leonard
Broadstone Books, 2025
If you had told me that I'd read in one sitting a book whose title poem begins with "ONCE LONG AGO in the hills by a great clear lake," I would have asked what you'd been smoking. Yes, these poems conjure fairy tales—castles, foraging, moonlit nights—but think Grimm, not Disney. The power is in the surprising pivots and parentheticals. Example:
"Once, my husband told me a story
(and I must pause here to say,
dear reader, please note, fat women
do fall in love and are
fallen-in-love with
all the time, every day, and it is not
some kind of miracle. Some of you
know this already but
some of you do not, so it has to be said)—
once my husband told me a story
about finding puppies in a refrigerator."
These are poems about finding not puppies (or princes) but your voice. And Megan Leonard's voice is one you need to hear.
by Paula Cisewski
Hanging Loose Press, 2024
I've never had a tarot reading, never even held a deck of tarot cards. So when I saw that Cisewski's The Becoming Game is based on Tarot readings of her friends, I thought this book was going to be too woo-woo for me. I was remembering Ouija Board games at teen sleepovers. But it's not woo-woo—it's WHOA. Right out of the gate I was hooked by these opening lines from "What Happened First Happened As If Nothing Was Happening.": "We lived in houses someone/ else built, carpooled in vehicles// named after endangered species./ What happened next was I woke// from that nightmare where I'm/ everybody's dad." That tense shift is doing a lot of work. Chilling. We get a lesson in both etymology and social isolation in "My Device: An American Tangle" (one of several "tangles"): "damn it/ device vines down from Old French/ devis and before that from Vulgar Latin/ divisare in both cases meaning/ division or to divide." In the book's notes, Cisewski explains that in response to the 2016 election, she developed a creative and social coping strategy that involved inviting friends for tea and a tarot reading, then drafting a poem inspired by the interaction. As a big believer in disrupting your writing practice to get somewhere new, I love this idea. Interestingly, the word "tarot" never appears in the poems (just a few references to cards), so the scaffolding of this project is not at all obvious. The result is not a slumber party seance but an incisive cultural critique, truthful and daring.
by Elizabeth C. Garcia
Cider Press Review, 2024
I just edited an anthology of poems about work, and one of my priorities was to have the work of parents & caregivers well represented. Resurrected Body, Garcia's dazzling debut, gives us a fresh look at both: childrearing and caring for aging parents. There are also moving poems about being a child. In "Event Horizon," the speaker recalls looking through her mother's jewelry box as a young girl, finding a diamond, and losing it in the carpet: "she finds you, drags the shag, rasps her palms/ combing for that stone, sobbing, her emblem/ of infinity lost to infinity, pulls you both/ into a denser, blacker place where/ she is no longer your mother/ just a woman/ wrecked." In "Ode to That Truck Driver Who Saved Me in 1978," a trucker finds a toddler with "blonde pigtails, red/ jumper, baby squat" in the middle of the road, knocks on the family's door and asks "Is this your little girl?" Many of these poems are funny (see "Mom & Tom Selleck," "Mommy Brain," and "Cotyledon," in which a mother drags her kids to the park "to kill the time before dinner/ instead of them"). Another funny poem, "Found," is a catalog of all the toys and snacks littering a home with kids: Hot Wheels and cracker crumbs and crayons and—the bane of bare feet—Legos. Near the end of the poem, she pleads, "God, make this poem more than mess." It occurs to me that this line sums up what many of us who write about parenting fear: that the poems won't rise above the ordinary mess of domesticity. But I think we need to see more of that mess in order for the work—the parent's work and the poet's work—to be seen and valued. Thank you to Elizabeth C. Garcia for showing us the labor, the beauty, and yes, the mess.
by Abbie Kiefer
June Road Press, 2024
As soon as I heard that this book "wields a Yankee sensibility" per Christina Olson's blurb, I knew I had to read it. As a native New Englander, I hoped to recognize the no-nonsense attitude I know and love. Certain Shelter did not disappoint. An aunt "sewed straight/ as her man's Yankee-stern mouth." In a play on the adage, there are "waste-not covers to circumvent want." One of several "brief history" poems, "Yankee Thrift, Yankee Ingenuity, and Yankee Work Ethic" is a catalog of, and tribute to, the Yankee spirit. I shared it with my Yankee mother who gave a standard Yankee response: "Yup." These are poems about a mother's death. But they aren't just "sad, sad poems." These are also poems about who the mother was before her illness: "grading papers in the kitchen/ or on the porch" (like my mom!), gardening, chatting with neighbors. The mother, we gather, didn't inherit the Yankee attitude toward labor. Spirited since youth, she preferred singing to helping her family with the harvest. In the lovely prose poem "A Brief History of Agriculture in Aroostook County, Maine," the speaker reflects on her own work ethic: "Say I never had an after-school job. Say my mother's garden only fostered flowers. What does that say about me? My lack of practice with an empty basket. That an upended barrel doesn't stir me to sing." There are poems about TV shows with New England connections (like Cheers and M*A*S*H), poems about the drive and grit of New England industry (mills, abandoned bowling alleys, train stations turned cannabis dispensaries), and poems about the pull of the place itself ("If you want to live there, Maine makes you work for it."). One of my favorites in this collection is "A Brief History of Documenting the Truth," a poem all writers can relate to. When I read it, I couldn't help but pronounce Worcester "Woosta" in my head. Throughout Certain Shelter, Kiefer documents the truth with tenderness and beauty. You don't have to be a Yankee to appreciate it.
The Stone Tries to Understand the Hands
by Susannah Sheffer
Cornerstone Press, 2025
"What interests me is/ how things get made," Sheffer writes in "Portrait of the Artist as Some Kind of Scholar." Same! What gets made in this book are careful studies of people, inanimate objects (apples, hands, a glass, a stick), and matters national/global (capital punishment, Watergate, the DMZ) and personal (bullying of others, learning from a mother's actions). Sheffer also focuses on her own process, as in "Elegy for the Rough Draft," which closes with these lines: "Praise the rough draft/ for saying not only/ this is what I am but also/ this is what I need." Likewise in "Letter" in which she addresses an abstraction: "Dear wanting, I didn't realize/ we could step out into the world/ together, and dance." If I had to sum up this collection in a word, it would be "passion": passion for observing, for writing, for living—for finding the world "amazing and amazing and again amazing."
by Robin Turner
Kelsay Books, 2025
It's so fitting that the proem of this collection, "Somewhere the Child," is a cento. After all, in grief we often turn to the words of others when we can't find our own. By splicing together lines from Judith E. Prest and Victoria Chang, Turner creates a powerful closing couplet: "When the mothers leave, what are we supposed to do?" That's the question this book seeks to answer. And if there is an answer, I'd say it's to write poem after poem, "beautiful bruise" after "beautiful bruise." In "All This Way," the speaker's mother—"alive again" —"[slips] back into this bent & broken world. To tell me something. To tell me. To tell." Fortunately, she seems to be telling her daughter to tell us the truth about love and grief. And Turner does so exquisitely.
Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them
by Ellen Stone
Mayapple Press, 2025
There are quite a few "after" poems in this collection (after Gerald Stern, Crisosto Apache, Tahereh Mafi, Vievee Francis, Patti Smith, and others). But while these writers may have inspired Stone, her extraordinary poems have a life of their own beyond the original sparks. Take this line from "The end of girlhood" after James Wright and Joni Mitchell: "years I gave away my body in a rush." In nine words, this is an entire memoir about youth and the female experience. Wow. Just wow. This is Stone's second full-length collection, and I'm eager to see what comes next.
by Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice
Main Street Rag, 2024
There are many stellar books about a writer's adoption, including John Gallaher's recent poetry collection "My Life in Brutalist Architecture." But I believe Dracos-Tice's debut "Lodged in the Belly" is the first poetry book I've read about a parent's adoption. I'll admit I skipped ahead to the end (and oh, that photo), then read straight from the beginning. But no spoilers. "Trying to Make Sense of It: A Family and a Scaffold" is an excellent model for writers seeking to frame a book-length project with a complicated backstory—I will definitely share it with my students. This collection is suspenseful—not a word I use often with poetry—and also haunting. From "Crumbs": "Your adoption file remained/ empty, crisp at its manila seam,/ waiting for a note,/ even a crumb or its stain,/ any sign she wanted you/ to find your way home." Dracos-Tice draws on court transcripts, adoption records, DNA test kit graphics, personal items, and memories to assemble, collage-style, a portrait of family which, she reminds us, "is always a work-in-progress, forming, re-forming, transforming." Note I did not say "a" family or "her" family, for this stunning collection of documentary poetry is ultimately about all families.
by Bryanna Licciardi
Alternating Currents Press, 2024
This is a carefully curated exhibit of things we are taught not to say out loud, let alone in public. And by "we," I mean women. Example: "Trying to Reason with the Baby I Never Plan to Have" in which Licciardi writes, "Know that Americans are overeaters,/ that you would probably be obese because/ my cat is obese, and because I eat/ when I'm upset and babies upset me." So many taboos shattered in one poem! I say "curated" because these are not random, unfiltered blurts. There is humor with perfect timing, poignancy, precise imagery, le mot juste après le mot juste. Selfishly, I'm glad Licciardi is writing poems, but damn, she could make a killing writing for TV. The title of this poem alone could be a hit Netflix series: "Twenty Seven-Year-Old Virgin Sex Addict." Read "Fish Love" if you want to laugh, think, and feel liberated to say everything you've been holding back.
Poetic People Power: Three Spoken Word Shows for Social Change
Edited and created by Tara Bracco
Portage Poetry Series, 2024
Tara Bracco is the Producing Artistic Director of Poetic People Power, a poetry project that she founded in 2003. It was—in Bracco's words—"influenced by the democratization of the slam scene and driven by a punk, Do-It-Yourself ethos." This book represents contributions from 12 poets from three different Poetic People Power shows from 2017-2021 on environmentalism, women's voices, and human rights abuses. As the former executive director of a nonprofit arts organization for underserved communities, I have a deep appreciation for the work Bracco and her collaborators are doing. And this book comes at the perfect time. While reading this collection, I've been immersed in social poetics as I edit an anthology of poems about work that received 3,600(!) submissions. Poetic People Power goes beyond Bracco's words—it's about her actions and activism that have empowered other artists for more than two decades. At the end of their shows, the performers as the audience, "What art will you make? What action will you take?" We readers of this powerful collection should ask ourselves the same questions.
by Hilary King
Riot in Your Throat Press, 2024
In 8th grade I declared I'd never take a job that required high heels or waking to an alarm clock. (I've managed to avoid heels, but no one warned me that kids are living, breathing alarm clocks.) So I loved reading King's poem "The Year I Wore Heels," partly because of the subject but also because of the hilarious opening: "It wasn't actually a year,/ but it was more than twice." By the end of the brief poem, she's calling out the entire effing patriarchy. So much work in so little space! King is the master of the volta, the surprising turn. And her poems are funny without being snarky, always digging deeper beyond the joke. Take "Woman Becoming Winston Churchill," which begins with "It happened after menopause. My waistline and my comfort/ with power grew imperceptibly until one day I found myself/ having whiskey at breakfast and convincing America to enter/ the war" and builds to the speaker realizing she's at the peak of her powers: "It's not just that I want to set the world right;/ it's that now I know how to." In the closing poem, "Bury Me in a Coastal Grandmother"—a send-up of the trendy "coastal grandmother" aesthetic—King conjures an end of life with "calm colors to neutral/ my way out." But there's nothing beige about this extraordinary collection—think Marimekko, not Eileen Fisher. Vibrant and bold, these poems walk into a room and turn heads. I'm going to end with these lines that I love, just because: "How many books does it take to change a light-/ bulb? None. We've memorized this darkness. I wake up with the corners of/ my personality folded down and my margins full of notes."
by Ching-in Chen
Airlie Press, 2025
Resisting syntax as resistance. Resisting syntax as syntax. Three twice in titles many times that's how the word syntax appears in "Shiny City" a book that aware of the politics of grammar plays with order(s). What I am (am I) doing here, do you see? History. Chinese. California. Riverside. On the altar of rules made up all rules are sacrificed. The book documents. The book's documents. Fantastic as in amazing as in conjured shiny. Proem ("partly ablaze"): "we all burned down/ without yelling fire." We = they = all of us not yelling then and now when we see fire. FIRE.
by Laurie Kuntz
Moonstone Press, 2025
I've been thinking a lot about marriage lately. Maybe because my husband and I recently celebrated our 33rd anniversary. Maybe because I just officiated our youngest daughter's wedding in October. So when I read Kuntz's tender poem "While My Husband Forgets Our Wedding Anniversary," it made me feel all the feels. The poem says so much about what's unspoken in longtime relationships. In another marriage poem, the speaker starts "to complain about each other's complaints" while walking with her spouse until they "turn a corner on all that needs to be turned." There's humor in this collection, too—see "Haiku of 50 Years and 40 Pounds Ago" or "My Conversation with Death" in which the speaker cannot convince Death to "to take a sabbatical,/ a leave of absence,/ or weekends off." But Death be damned, "Balance" is a book about living, truly living, despite the threat of mortality, war, and natural disasters. These are poems that want to eat all the bread and spread all the butter, and I'm here for it.
