The scope of Olio, the latest poetry collection from Tyehimba Jess (Wave Books) is sweeping, excavating the stories of Black performers and musicians from the last decades of slavery, through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and up through the First World…
Vandana does something special here. Amidst the language of nature—the lush green forests, the stars, the twigs—this poem grips our bodies firm. Vandana finds space to bring in bones & tongues & the pulse of blood, & especially those hands.…
Poetry, at its best, engages the human body in whatever way it can. There is room enough for poems like this one by Sarah Barber—room enough to speak truth to the needles ravaging American families. Sarah doesn’t hide here, nor…
This poem performs its conceit well. A familiar anxiety hugs the imagery—that all too familiar unease of love lost & discarded. Pay attention to the way the conceit returns, returns again, & rides the imagery like an unhappy passenger. See…
Josephine Yu accomplishes something difficult here: a poem that talks about faith with neither the baggage of too much self-seriousness or half-thought cynicism. She brings fresh urban landscapes into the language of small transcendence—grounding, as we watch, the suicide, the…
