Reviews - November 2012

'As a friend seated beside the poet'

A review of Pam Brown's 'True Thoughts'

The title of its first poem, “Existence,” signals that True Thoughts may be aiming for the high rarified light of metaphysics, but Pam Brown’s version of existence links a series of lived moments delicately by chance, proximity, irony and imaginative association, such that existence is this embodied bricolage of moments arriving obliquely at the unhurried pace of living.

The gestural lyric and beyond

A review of Amy King's 'I Want to Make You Safe'

Barry Schwabsky

Amy King’s poems are written from a place without an overview. The opposite of Olympian, this poetry is down here with the rest of us, mired in the details, some of which may be tedious while others astonish — a poetry just trying to keep its head in the air, mainly for survival’s sake. Sometimes those details come in lists, like this one from “The Strange Power of Lying to Yourself”:

I don’t know. A bunch of things. The mail, a bi-racial couple,

songs about a boyfriend who doesn’t understand, Thai people