Reviews

Taking the concept of meaning-making by storm

A review of 'Cyclones in High Northern Latitudes'

Prefatory Note:

I struggled with this review for a very, very long time. Both Jeffrey Side and Jake Berry's aesthetics are deeply invested in maximizing each reader's unique contribution to the process of meaning-making, and both would vehemently resist any effort that might seem to reduce a poem to a "stable and finite" reading. Side in particular has powerfully encouraged readers to resist merely being "passive witnesses," and to consciously search out "less obvious or appropriate" meanings.[1]

On three recent books of poetry

Reviews of Tichy, Tadić and Barskova

Jay Aquinas Thompson

What does it mean to witness? What becomes of the object of an unsustained inquiry? Gallowglass, Susan Tichy’s fourth book of poems, tries for answers. It’s an afterwards-document of calamity and of a loss of understanding, charged with elegiac grief for one lost and with an enervated sadness at our country’s role in terrible violence in the Middle East.

A sensuous field of attention

A review of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's 'Concordance'

Julie Joosten

In a 2003 interview printed in Jacket, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge noted, “For me, collaboration has been a wonderful way to open someone else’s sensibility, to use that openness like oxygen or ocean.” Concordance is such a collaboration and such an openness.

The buried encounter

Josie Sigler's living

Kiala Givehand

In her debut book of poems, Josie Sigler links life with violence, love with loss, and mourning with the natural progression of time. Published by Fence Books as the 2010 winner of the Motherwell Prize, Living Must Bury is a mixture of repeated phrases, historical flashes, and tragic endings linked by the universal experience of living.

But there is a person there

A review of 'The Morning News Is Exciting'

Sarah Louise Green

Okay, okay. I’ll admit it. I definitely judge a book by its cover. And Don Mee Choi’s debut, The Morning News Is Exciting, is no exception. The front cover sports a large, white exclamation point, penetrated by hundreds of colored bands that seem to explode from the spine. Yes, exciting, to say the least! Robert McKenna’s cover design is conceptually derived (the process is described in the end matter) and quite arresting, but I actually spent more time considering the back cover. Like any curious reader, I wanted to know what I was getting myself into, and who had recommended it.