Category: Poetry

O Lady, Speak Again by Dayna Patterson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Dayna Patterson’s poems in O Lady, Speak Again form a chorus of voices brimming with female power. The collection is an evocation, of the lady ghosts of Shakespeare’s stories and all the women who ever were caught in their roles: mothers, daughters, witches, wives, mourners, queens, nymphs, corpses. They all sing words from Patterson’s own life, vulnerable and generously given. Exploring the tensions caught in the tangle of religion, longing, rage, vision, and ultimately healing, Patterson takes the stage with searing certainty, bringing her lines into conversation with Shakespeare’s to incant a protective spell over women everywhere.



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The Lethargy of Fog by Joseph M. Lopez

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Joseph M. Lopez’s poetry collection THE LETHARGY OF FOG is meditative and open, a recursive journey through months and days, churchyards and forest trails, winter as the long quiet way of finding one’s way back to the beginning. I love how honest this book is.

Favorites from this collection:
◇A Comforting Sound
◇The Axe Man
◇Constant
◇Winter is a Woman
◇L.Y.
◇Saturday in the Rain



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I/O by Madeleine Wattenberg

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Madeleine Wattenberg’s poetry collection I/O is as startling as it is innovative. The imagery through-lines of coins, peacocks, plums, laboratories, dirigibles, and knives complicate a story that is the echo of myth come to rest in a 2000’s apartment kitchen. These poems whisper and lurk, confess and shroud. Anyone turned into what they never meant to be will find themselves in Wattenberg’s careful verse, burning with cold.

My favorites from this collection:
* Charon’s Obol
* Field Guide to Fission
* Imprint with Need
* The Blazing Field
* Osteoclasts
* Aphagia
* Poem for the Father Outside the Poem
* (Re)
* Except by Violence (ii)



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The Necessity of Wildfire by Caitlin Scarano

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Caitlin Scarano’s offerings in The Necessity of Wildfire are open-eyed and as full of grace and blood as ever. Her poetry consistently astonishes me. In this book, the heaviness and hauntedness of place is one of the most rewarding aspects, as the landscapes of Virginia and Washington assert themselves as roaring forces that accompany the speaker’s experience. Scarano’s poems are both unforgiving and tender, filled with scorching power. Some of these lines, I’m telling you.



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Rain in the Trees by W.S. Merwin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Merwin was an absolute master and is one of my favorite poets. This collection from 1988 is not as transcendent and timeless as some of his others for me, being very much of its own moment.

Still some gems, though:
– “After School”
– “Empty Water”
– “Waking to the Rain”
– “Anniversary on the Island”
– “The Solstice”
– “Travelling Together”
– “The Rose Beetle”



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The Hatchet and the Hammer by Caitlin Scarano

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


How much of us is our body? How much of us is our history?

The Hatchet and the Hammer by Caitlin Scarano is here to reckon, defying genre, clear-eyed and standing two inches from those questions without flinching or ornament. Generations of trauma and violence, physical and imagined, threaten the speaker–but Scarano’s poetry dissects that threat in a way that peers into its origins, interrogates the idea of blame, is still standing at the end, and finishes with a roar.



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Felon: Poems by Reginald Dwayne Betts

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Poetry subverts the failure of language to embody another human’s experience. Reginald Dwayne Betts harnesses this power with Felon: Poems, his poetry collection about the impact of mass incarceration in America and the hands it holds with racism. These poems are breathing things–they speak to our time and are spun from whispers and screams from all angles of the things we call prisons… and the social systems that contribute to filling them.

My favorites from this collection:
-“When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving”
-“City of the Moon”
-“Diesel Therapy”
-“Essay on Reentry (I)”
-“Night”
-“Exile”



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Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s collection Oceanic is specifically personal and intentionally global at the same time, and in that contrast it builds a welcoming entry point for many different readers. The marine motifs disappear and return throughout, but Nezhukumatathil’s clear voice is the sea in which these poems scuttle and breathe. Many surprises to find.

My favorite poems in this volume:
*Self-Portrait as Scallop
*End-of-Summer Haibun
*The Two Times I Loved You Most on a Farm
*Letter to the Northern Lights
*The Psyche poems
*First Time on the Funicular



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Soft Science by Franny Choi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Choi’s poetry is innovative, unafraid, and visceral in so many surprising ways in her collection Soft Science. The unifying concept is a fusion of science and soul, technology and body, as she uses poems crafted around the Turing Test as a frame for the different sections of the book. As detached as the poems can intentionally be, often self-referencing as a “cyborg,” they are also deeply personal. Choi’s work lives in a place that is foreign but familiar, human but more (or less). The structure in many of these poems carries a particular kind of cool.

My favorites in this collection:
*All six “Turing Test” poems
*Making Of
*On the Night of the Election
*A Brief History of Cyborgs
*Afterlife
*I Swiped Right on the Borg
*Solitude

and especially
*Perihelion: A History of Touch
*Introduction to Quantum Theory




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Lord of the Butterflies by Andrea Gibson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Andrea Gibson is an extraordinarily powerful poet. I was so lucky to see Andrea perform in Green Bay about a year ago, and revisiting the poems on the page brings back the memory of that fire. This collection approaches gender, violence, and humanity with a voice that is tender in both its passion and its rage. It is a voice that is honest and disruptive, but always in the service of love. While I am so happy to have this volume on paper, it does not compare to experiencing the collection in performance–Andrea’s delivery is an essential ingredient in experiencing these poems in their full power.

My favorites from this collection:
Ivy
Tincture
Radio
Living Proof
First Love



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