Reviews - June 2022

Lyric shard as grief's material

A review of Diana Khoi Nguyen's 'Ghost Of'

Kelly Hoffer

Part archive, part elegy, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection of poetry, Ghost Of, presents the haunting portrait of a grieving family set against a backdrop of intergenerational trauma. Written four years after the poet’s brother took his own life, Nguyen’s poems register this loss as it is refracted through the story of her parents’ immigration to the US as refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War.

Pieces of Bruce

'Bruce Boone Dismembered'

Rodney Koeneke
Dancing maenad on ancient greek pottery, Python the painter, c. 330–320 BCE. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

I wouldn’t want anyone’s heart to stop beating except that for the first time this might unite us — Bruce Boone[1]

'Meeting this strangeness'

Katherine Agyemaa Agard's 'of colour'

Katherine Franco
Image adapted from cover art of ‘of colour.’

of colour commences in an apology. Rather, Katherine Agyemaa Agard suggests her text was born out of a failure to make a film about the African diaspora “or simply our diaspora. My mother and father and brother and sister and me.”[1] It’s come to this is the sentiment at the beginning of the text. It’s come to a textual object because another form failed.

There must be pleasure

A review of Alli Warren’s 'Little Hill'

Sara Larsen
“‘Little Hill’ ... embraces radical, multitudinous forms of love, rendered visible in a number of compelling guises: milkweed, poplar, ocean, inquiry, ... ‘the whale’s heft, buoyant in dark sea.’” Photo by Christopher Michel, via Flickr.

Little Hill by Alli Warren is a poetry collection that embraces radical, multitudinous forms of love, rendered visible in a number of compelling guises: milkweed, poplar, ocean, inquiry, the portion of the neck where one’s nose fits, anticapitalist philosophy, music, “the whale’s heft, buoyant in dark sea,”[1] community, resonance. The poems refute and reimagine the present with a measured and resolute sonic temperance: