A Pulitzer Prize–Winning Collection By Sara London, Poetry Editor Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (Minneapolis: Gray Wolf Press, March 3, 2020; 120pp; $16.00; ISBN 978-1-64445-014-7). Natalie Diaz’s second collection, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for poetry, is a raw and exuberant evocation of rage, resistance, and desire. The ‘want’ that is waged here, however,…
Category: poetry book reviews
On Steven Cramer’s "Listen"
An Appreciation By Joyce Peseroff, WTP Contributing Editor Steven Cramer knows his way around a poem more than almost anyone I’ve had the pleasure of listening to. Quote a Dickinson line, and he’ll bring up two examples of how she uses the same diction elsewhere. He’ll find a writer like Robert Walser and re-envision his…
Book Review: Free Ferry
A Growing America in the Nuclear Age By Linda Simone Linda Simone’s poetry publications include Archeology (Flutter Press, 2014) and Cow Tippers (Shadow Poetry Press, 2006). Her poems, essays, and book reviews appear in numerous journals and anthologies. Born and raised in New York, she now lives in San Antonio, Texas, where the landscape and…
Book Review: Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur
The Inclination to Celebrate Things By Alfred Nicol Alfred Nicol’s most recent collection of poetry, Animal Psalms, was published in 2016 by Able Muse Press. Nicol has published two other collections, Elegy for Everyone (2009), and Winter Light, which received the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, Dark Horse,…
Review: Inner Space Ghost Machine
Poetry Responds to Poetry By Charlie Baylis Inner Space Ghost Machine is UK poet Rupert M. Loydell’s pamphlet-length response to US poet Daniel Y. Harris’s “post-human reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets,” The Rapture of Eddy Daemon. Loydell takes Harris’s poetry and blows it across the stratosphere into a “strange corner” of the universe, replete with “faulty androids,”…
Book Review: Suddenly, It's Evening
“It may be evening, but it’s not yet night.” By Joyce Peseroff, Contributing Editor SUDDENLY, IT’S EVENING: SELECTED POEMS, John Skoyles (Carnegie Mellon, 2016). 112 pp. $16.95 INSIDE JOB, John Skoyles (Carnegie Mellon, 2016). 72 pp. $12.25. John Skoyles has had a long career as a poet, memoirist, novelist, essayist, editor, and academic. The title…
Book Review: Know Thyself
“A poet writes to continue asking questions” By Ruth Lepson, poet-in-residence at New England Conservatory of Music It takes nerve to write homophonic renderings of Shakespeare’s sonnets, yet that’s exactly what Joyce Peseroff has done in one section of her well-crafted, complex recent book of poems: Like a granite island quarried to oblivion, her husband’s memory…
Book Review: Grabbing the Apple
An Anthology of New York Women Poets By Joyce Peseroff, Contributing Editor Edited byTerri Muuss and M.J. Tenerelli JB Stillwater Publishing The foreword to Terri Muuss and M.J. Tenerelli’s anthology of poems by New York women poets, Grabbing the Apple, could have been written forty years ago. “In response to the glaring lack of parity…
Book Review: Versed by Rae Armantrout
Judging by the Blurb By Joyce Peseroff, Contributing Editor I’m writing for the first time about a book I haven’t finished yet. My friend Sharon Bryan recommended Rae Armantrout’s Versed, and I’m enjoying a precision as sharp and startling as the plunge of a needle in Armantrout’s spare, tight lines. Who expects “mass market” to follow…