Orchid Tierney

Worldly belongings

Orchid Tierney

Reviews editor Orchid Tierney returns with capsule reviews of Bamboophobia by Ko Ko Thett, Air Raid by Polina Barskova, and Togetherness by Wo Chan. From the Ko Ko Thett review: “The collection includes thirteen poems Ko Ko Thett had written and translated himself from the Burmese, but arguably this is entirely a work of translation. The poet compellingly demonstrates the fuzziness of language to convey its atmospheric social and political nuances: ‘Come morning, we say, “Have you eaten?” to / celebrate the day, for we are still here.’”

Reviews editor Orchid Tierney returns with capsule reviews of Bamboophobia by Ko Ko Thett, Air Raid by Polina Barskova, and Togetherness by Wo Chan.

Vulnerabilities at the end of the world

Orchid Tierney

Orchid Tierney reviews three 2021 titles that explore survival in periods of crisis: Poem That Never Ends by Silvina López Medin (Essay Press, 2021); A Feeling Called Heaven by Joey Yearous-Algozin (Nightboat Books, 2021); and Curb by Divya Victor (Nightboat Books, 2021).

Between kindness and precarity

Orchid Tierney

Orchid Tierney reviews three titles that engage with Anthropocene landscapes: Edgeland and other poems by David Eggleton; Habitat Threshold by Craig Santos Perez; and Mezzaluna: Selected Poems by Michele Leggott.

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'

“[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.

Fables, selfhood, and affect

Orchid Tierney

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

Three New Zealand writers look back at Kiwi poetry
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

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.

The quotidian

Orchid Tierney

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'

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. 

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.

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