Reviews - March 2016

Something like flowers

A review of Angel Dominguez's 'Black Lavender Milk'

I am taking a flight home to Miami today. I’ve already read a PDF of Angel Dominguez’s Black Lavender Milk while at school in Philadelphia, but now I’ve got the physical thing in my hand, printed in blue letters, and I have a chance to read it the way it was written: on a plane home.

In his element

A review of 'The Astonishment Tapes'

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Photo of Robin Blaser (left) courtesy of the Electronic Poetry Center.

Robin Blaser is in his element in these monologues in interview format — personable, pedagogic, and himself a “high-energy construct,” to not-quite-cite Charles Olson. By virtue of this book, the reader experiences Blaser as a unique force field of magnetic knowledge and charismatic charm. He is at home among the poets, themselves practitioners and friends, meeting in 1974 at someone’s house in Vancouver.

Necessary companionship

A review of Laynie Browne's 'Scorpyn Odes'

Norman Fischer

Laynie Browne is one of our finest poets working in the mode I am calling contemplative poetry. By which I mean not necessarily a poetry that is contemplative in the religious sense (though yes, inescapably there is also that in Laynie’s work) but rather in the compositional sense, that is, writing itself, language itself, composition itself.

A sense of community is everywhere apparent in the poetry world — the desire to share and promote what is offered widely, and to make of poetry a means to transform minds, hearts, and social practice. Fortunately or unfortunately, it can be difficult in all this to find a space quiet enough for a contemplative spirit, an exploratory sense, in the poem, of working through what’s real in how to respond to a world in and through language. For me the value of this is much more than personal, more than the pleasure it affords.