Orchid Tierney

Ghostly intimacies

Orchid Tierney

Reviews editor Orchid Tierney reviews three uncanny poetry titles: Scorpio by Katy Bohinc, Sheep Machine by Vi Khi Nao, and Motion Studies by Jena Osman.

Reviews editor Orchid Tierney reviews three uncanny poetry titles.

Imagining assemblage as maintenance

Rachel Blau DuPlessis and the 'Graphic Novella'

Orchid Tierney

“[P]oetry is full of garbage, which is to say, the textual traces drawn from literature are frequently reinscribed into new formats and configurations that speak to a desire to reorganize rejectamenta.” Detail of page 27 of ‘Graphic Novella’ by Rachel Blau Duplessis.

During a discussion with M.

June 20, 2019

Reviews editor Orchid Tierney returns with capsule reviews of three timely poetry titles: This Window Makes Me Feel by Rob Fitterman, H & G by Anna Maria Hong, and Echolocation by Evelyn Reilly.

Reviews editor Orchid Tierney returns with capsule reviews of three timely poetry titles.

Outside looking back in: Kiwi calibrate Kiwi poetry from afar.

Kiwi look back at Kiwi poetry

Vaughan Rapatahana (new)

Three New Zealand writers look back at Kiwi poetry

Kia ora ano.

As I strive to spread out any potential ingrained clench as to what makes for Kiwi poetry, any Kiwi poetic, away from ‘mainstream’ clutches that demand ‘appropriate’ ways of writing, presenting and publishing a poem, in this commentary I take into consideration what three expatriate Kiwi (aka Aotearoa New Zealand) writers think/reflect about Kiwi poetry from afar.

This is What Democracy Looks Like

Orchid Tierney

Polaroid image of protest
Polaroid image of protest, with sign reading "Peaceful and Pissed"

This is What Democracy Looks Like, November 13, 2016, polaroids taken at Philadelphia’s election result protest.

April 13, 2018

The quotidian

Orchid Tierney

Capsule reviews

J2 reviews editor Orchid Tierney reads three collections interrogating the poetic forms of the everyday — or, “the intimacy possible in the fractures”: Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi, Days and Works by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Abandoned Angel: New Poems by Burt Kimmelman.

J2 reviews editor Orchid Tierney reads three collections interrogating the poetic forms of the everyday.

Menacing archives

A review of Jennifer Scappettone's 'The Republic of Exit 43'

Orchid Tierney

Trucks dump garbage at Fresh Kills Landfill, May 1973. Photo by Chester Higgins with the EPA, via <a href= https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DUMPING_LANDFILL_AT_FRESH_KILLS,_ON_THE_WEST_SHORE_OF_STATEN_ISLAND_-_NARA_-_548348.jpg> Wikimedia Commons</a>. — Trucks dump garbage at Fresh Kills Landfill, May 1973. Photo by Chester Higgins with the EPA, via Wikimedia Commons.

What kind of archive is the landfill? How do disposable technologies haunt — or annul — the imaginaries of urban ecologies? Landfills and wastelands often preserve more than personal and communal memories: narratives of city development, domestic and global economies, cultural infrastructures, and processes that underpin technological innovations.

Rootless places: Núñez, Queyras, Dunham

Orchid Tierney

Capsule reviews

J2 reviews editor and commentator Orchid Tierney reviews tasks by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, Barking & Biting by Sina Queyras, and Cold Pastoral by Rebecca Dunham. Of tasks she writes, in part: “Núñez’s poems chronicle the peripheries of a Cuban homecoming while exploring the porousness of identity and nationalism so marked by a feeling of loss. ‘[I]dentity lurks,’ writes Núñez, ‘like a forgotten ring in a public bathroom.’ These poems are lucid, nomadic but not driftless in local memory as they prowl the geographies of migrant return and exile.”

J2 reviews editor and commentator Orchid Tierney writes on three poetry titles from this year and last.

'Experimental' poetry — part one

'Experimental' Poetry - part one

Vaughan Rapatahana

Kia ora ano.

Let’s take a spin and tumble into “experimental” poetry — more specifically within Aotearoa-New Zealand, but not necessarily resticted to that thin locale.

Make it reappear

A review of 'Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound'

Orchid Tierney

Reading Writing Interfaces by Lori Emerson undertakes the ambitious task to demystify the rhetoric of magic surrounding ubiquitous computing. When so-called invisibility, user-friendliness, and seamlessness are touted as integral features of a device, how can everyday users disrupt the imperceptibility of the interface to access its mechanisms?

Recently in Jacket2

Jacket2's January 2020 reading period

Jacket2

Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2020. Reviews of recent books or anthologies of poetics criticism and theory; reviews and articles devoted to poets and poetries outside the US; reviews, articles, or essays that put texts, authors, movements in conversation; coauthored reviews or essays; articles, essays, or features on the ephemeral, the local, or the emergent; on poetic movements, topics, or groups, rather than single authors; articles and features that make use of archival and multimedia materials; articles, reviews, and features by and/or about queer, nonbinary, trans, women, and nonwhite authors; and more.

Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited q

Near/Miss launches

Charles Bernstein

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

Learning by doing

A review of 'Spellbound: The Art of Teaching Poetry'

Celia Bland

Photo via <a href=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Transon,_moldings,_and

I collect poetry handbooks — as if by simply possessing them I could conquer my teaching anxieties. I’ll also admit that I have rarely, if ever, used the exercises and prompts in these how-to’s — neither the ones in Robin Behn and Chase Twichell’s The Practice of Poetry or in Kenneth Koch’s classic Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?, nor in any of the others. Pleasure lies in reading these books the way armchair cooks read recipes: intellectually savoring subtle combinations of flavors and forms while never tasting them in the kitchen.