Reviews - October 2013

'All my lies are honest'

A review of Chad Sweeney's 'Wolf's Milk'

Wolf’s Milk: The Lost Notebooks of Juan Sweeney, translated by Chad Sweeney, begins with an epigraph by the mythic Juan Sweeney himself: “The letter before A is silence.” This epigraph is having pure fun with form while it issues a grave statement about the nature of creation — like the poems of this collection.

Investigations in absentia

On Paige Ackerson-Kiely

A. E. Watkins

Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s poetry resides in no one’s land, in the heartland of John Keats’s negative capability.[1] In Book About a Candle Burning in a Shed, Ackerson-Kiely makes a bittersweet home there.

This chapbook — a collection of twenty-two prose poems that follow the case of a drowned girl through the eyes of an aloof detective — is filled with lyric possibility, crime fiction, love, loss, solar tetherball, identity questioning, heavy doses of negation, and bleak-as-hell small-city-America depictions.

Divinest sense: On Paul Pines

Norman Finkelstein

Paul Pines begins Divine Madness, his remarkable new volume of poetry, with an epigraph from Plato’s Phaedrus: “if any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to naught by the poetry of madness.

Sailor, sleepwalker

A review of 'I Was There for Your Somniloquy'

Frank Montesonti

The ocean is a place of the fantastic and bizarre, a world full of creatures so different from our terrestrial designs they might as well be from another planet. Rightfully, then, the ocean is also a metaphor for the unconscious, that unseen place off the map of ourselves where the old cartographers would write “where monsters lie.”