Reviews

'Besieged by grief'

A review of Rachel Tzvia Back's 'A Messenger Comes'

In Rachel Tzvia Back’s collection of poems A Messenger Comes (Singing Horse Press, 2012), the poet, like a biblical Deborah bearing a torch, arrives to illuminate the dark, devastated, and devastating space of grief.

'The architecture and ambience of the maze'

A review of Marie Buck's 'Amazing Weapons'

Brandon Brown

Let’s find our way out of this maze, the title of the opening poem in Marie Buck’s Amazing Weapons, draws an etymological fact to our attention, the relation in English between the noun maze and the verb amaze. All the maze words stem from old Germanic words referring to labor.

'As a friend seated beside the poet'

A review of Pam Brown's 'True Thoughts'

Chad Sweeney

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

'Imagined lexicography opens onto imagined anthropology'

A review of Ben Marcus's 'The Flame Alphabet'

Len Gutkin

The Age of Wire and String (1995), Ben Marcus’s debut collection of stories, gave us the manual for a bizarre and wonderful alternate reality, a “catalog of the life project as prosecuted in the Age of Wire and String and beyond.”[1] As in Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus or Raymond Queneau’s 1948 novel Saint-Glinglin, important predecessors, Marcus’s alternate universe emerges out of the methodical strangeness of his language.[2] Fabulism and verbal experimentation become mutually entwined. Marcus’s primary method is the imaginary lexicographical definition, and the bulk of The Age of Wire and String might be thought of as a collection of entries from some unreal dictionary. For instance: “Yard, the Locality in which wind is buried and houses are discussed. Fine grains line the banks. Water curves outside the pastures. Members settle into position” (65). Imagined lexicography opens onto imagined anthropology, with impossible rites and technologies described in eerie detail.