book reviews

Reviews of the best poetry books, collections and anthologies; discover poems and up-and-coming poets across all cultures, genres and themes.

Dunn's Poetic Work Intoxicates
Readers be warned: To read Mark D. Dunn's 2014 poetic collection Even the Weapons is to feel the headiness of imbibing too much wine. His work is at once grounded in a thick snow fall and yet still, these poems are lifted off into more cerebral, cosmic planes. The poetry within this well crafted collection fluctuates between the realms of daydream and every day without bothering with any of reality's stringent tethers. In all honesty, the second movement is what can be best described as a stream of consciousness; readers will lose themselves in a twirling dream state where the poetic lines become touch points of thought, of connection, of some kind of reality rather than simple pretty words in boxed up stanzas.
By Laura DiNovis Berry7 years ago in Poets
Book Report: 'The White Goddess'
If you haven’t read part one of my series analyzing this great masterpiece, here is a link to the first chapter. This chapter takes the literary analysis further into the substance and content of folklore, continuing on the themes introduced in the first chapter.
By KJ Thomas7 years ago in Poets
Book Report: 'The White Goddess'
I’ve read The White Goddess so many times the lines evoke memories and emotions to me like bible verses or Princess Bride quotes. Over the years I’ve tried to get dozens of friends and lovers to read this thing so I will have someone to talk to about it, but apparently the wordy obscurity of it is a bit too much for most people. Personally, the prose is dense in a mesmerizing way, like a holy text somehow engineered to plug into my individual neurological DNA. I would blindly offer my hand in marriage to anyone who reads this thing and forms some interesting opinions about it, but so far no takers.
By KJ Thomas7 years ago in Poets
Vivisection of a Woman
Christine E. Ray's first full poetry collection Composition of a Woman, published in 2018 by Sudden Denouement Publishing, is a fine addition to the universe of feminist poetry. It also must be said that Ray's cover, designed by Mitch Green, is seducing with its outlines of supple flesh upon the deep, matte black canvas, the brilliant white of a solid female skeleton, which is topped by a vibrant, genteel flower. This makes the interior work, which reads as if a vivisection has been performed upon the speaker, all the more shocking to the reader beholding it. While the bones of this collection are indeed hardy, they are not all quite as elegant as the body depicted on the cover.
By Laura DiNovis Berry7 years ago in Poets
Transmutation into Paper
Jayne Marek's 2018 poetry collection, The Tree Surgeon Dreams of Bowling, is a long exhale of breath broken into three specific movements. These movements showcase very distinct emotional territories as well as perform the transformation of a flesh and blood woman into ink. The opening of the book is filled with a cold bitterness. This is a marked change from what follows in later pages. Readers are then met with the serenity and calm which is wafted into the air by the flicking pages found in the middle of the collection. At last, in the final selection, Marek offers up a sense of subdued bereavement to her readers. Together, these factions form a whole work which is a hushed whisper; impressive lines seem to speak a little louder, assuring themselves places in the reader's memories, and an escape from loneliness on the page.
By Laura DiNovis Berry7 years ago in Poets
Follow The Flaming Cross
The moon is a looming quarter as all of Glendale sit on their back porches, gazing across the valley boarder. Singing hails to god Camulus, keeping vigilant order
By H.L. Dowless7 years ago in Poets
A Pleasing Study in Pain
White hot searing pain exploding through every cell, shrieks echoing in each and every molecule throughout a body in utter havoc—that's the intense sensation the cover (artfully designed by Chris Arabadjis) of Willa Carroll's 2018 poetry book,Nerve Chorus, thrusts upon the beholder. Carroll's collection of poems zeros in on the unadulterated pain of simply existing. The pieces within this work each explore and subsequently flush out the wide array of physical agonies which make themselves available to human beings struggling to survive in this realm as well as the emotional traumas humans so often face. She doesn't shirk from tenuous situations. She instead tackles these painful emotional occurrences by chronicling the suicide of an uncle and the decay of a parent. The work as a whole is a deliberate translation of pain, a truly wonderful subject to investigate, even to wallow in. For as Carroll states in "EmergencyRoom," "Pain is perfect. Total. One-pointed. No maybes."
By Laura DiNovis Berry7 years ago in Poets
Five Poetry Books You Can't Miss
Poetry is an art. There’s no limit to the number of stories that can be told and feelings that can be conveyed in verse. I’m personally a big fan of our Instapoets, including Rupi Kaur and Amanda Lovelace, but I’d like to share several books that fans of these massively popular modern poets will also enjoy. This list contains a mix of old and new books of poetry about love and musings on life in general.
By Leigh Victoria Phan, MS, MFA7 years ago in Poets
LaForge Instills New Life into Ancient Myth
Published by Ravenna Press in 2017, the poet and prose author Jane Rosenberg LaForge's work Daphne And Her Discontents weaves a complicated, personal family history and ancient Greek myth into a complete, original poetry collection. The intertwining of personal stories with a piece of history shared by the world allows these poems to travel into the past, throughout present and well into the future. This strategy elevates LaForge's collection to a new plane. It also effectively destabilizes readers as LaForge has done quite well in creating an atmosphere which feels as though "...we move as though space and sea inverted..."
By Laura DiNovis Berry7 years ago in Poets
Analysis of 'The Lady's Dressing Room'
Swift had written many parodies regarding ideas and thoughts that were presented in the 18th century. In “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” Swift shows a whole other side of femininity, the more hidden and disgusting side and the poem demonstrates how the man’s reaction changes towards the woman once he goes snooping in the lady’s dressing room. The entirety of the poem is meant to come off as a satire for both men and women. For women it is to stop trying to reach men’s unrealistic expectations, by taking hours in the dressing room trying to look like a goddess and for men the satire is meant to make men not invade a woman’s private space because one might find things that they were not supposed to and it might trigger some emotions that turn a man into someone who sees ugliness and not beauty. examples are all meant for satire that women try to match up to men’s unrealistic expectations by going through all the trouble, to impress a man. In “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” we can see the humorous side of the 18th century; Jonathan Swift has a unique way of expressing problems of the 18th century through using a sense of humor and even more so, wit.
By Ada Zuba7 years ago in Poets
Flashes of Attraction but No Reaction
Passion and sexuality are often (if not THE) most powerful muses for poetry, unfortunately the poetic verses of Adrian Ernesto Cepeda do not do justice to the more steamy, erotic side of humanity. His collection, Flashes & Verses... Becoming Attractions, published by Unsolicited Press in 2018, is an exercise in melodrama. Used to excess, the words "cream" and "licked" rapidly begin to fill the reader with a profound distaste and those soured words will (unhappily) linger with said reader even when the book is at a close. The poetry in which Cepeda features the delicacies of the human flesh is not sensual or even gratuitous for that matter, but mawkish.
By Laura DiNovis Berry7 years ago in Poets
'The Minute' Is Immense in Young's Poetry
Michael T. Young's poetry book, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, reads as the notebook of an obsessive naturalist who is desperate to record every last detail found in the world around him. It can be said that the utter essence of Young's collection is revealed through the speaker's comments in "Spy Game;" this book of poetry is simply the elegant translation of "...an entry in the sidewalk's journal..." which had previously been "...scripted in rainwater..." Young is intensely fascinated with the finer points of daily life, especially those details that often end up slipping unnoticed through even a keen observer's fingertips.
By Laura DiNovis Berry7 years ago in Poets