Review by Rhina P. Espaillat This recent work by poet Richard Levine is divided into three sections with titles that refer to very different aspects of the human lot: “The Law of Blood and Death,” “The Law of Peace, Work, and Health,” and “The Law of Endangered Environments, Viruses, and Hope.” As titles those are
Review by Daphne Astor Ilka Scobie’s new book, Any Island, published by Spuyten Press, is a powerful collection of lyric poems and free verse contemporary elegies that are delivered with wit and courage. Scobie is a lifelong New Yorker, born in Brooklyn in the 1950s. She writes in deceptively plain language about daily life at
Review by Victoria Reynolds In Orange Tulips, Joan Barasovska explores the perilous territory where, as a young woman, she was “neither dead nor safe” (57). We follow her out onto the ledges and lethal precipices of her own mind, then into a locked psychiatric ward, where, as a young woman, she battles a “death sentence
Review by Melinda Thomsen https://www.jchesterjohnson.com/Pegasus Books, ISBN, 9781643134666 Call It By Its Name My copy of J. Chester Johnson’s Damaged Heritage arrived on May 27th, the day after reports of George Floyd’s murder at the knee of a police officer. I finished the book in three days because Johnson’s compelling story gave me hope. In
Review by Rachael Warmington Edited by Alice QuinnAlfred A. Knopf, 2020, 184 pages, $27.00ISBN 978-0-593-31872-0 In the Introduction to the anthology of poems, Together in a Sudden Strangeness, Alice Quinn observes that these poets are from across America and “the landscapes and events they are experiencing” are reflected in their poems (xvii). This is apparent
by Pamela L. Laskin Gregory Crosby’s latest collection of poetry, Said No One Ever, is a nostalgic journey back through popular culture, music, art, form, birth and transformation as he explores the ghosts and the music of language. Ghosts since so many people Crosby has known and loved have died, and the way he keeps them
Review by Holly Mason Growing up in a Kurdish-American home, I only had my mother’s stories of Kurdistan and Iraq as a frame of reference for that land and the Kurdish experience and struggle. She described pleasant nights, sleeping on an upper courtyard in the fresh air with her siblings; her mother interpreting dreams each
by Katherine Judith Anderson In 1884, a white American named Lyman Stewart founded Union Oil of California. To get his start, he’d leveraged the American “rule of capture,” which granted drillers the right to siphon out any oil they discovered below the surface, no matter who owned the land itself. By 1920, Union Oil owned
Review by Sonia N. Gonzalez Ships carrying captured and enslaved men, women and children first arrived on the shores of Puerto Rico in the early 1500s, as Spanish colonizers on the island looked to Africa for human labor. A Woman of Endurance, the sophomore novel by Afro-Puerto Rican author Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, opens more than three
Shearsman Books, 2020 Review by Hilary Sideris Mervyn Taylor’s most recent collection of poems is about contrasts and contradictions, as its title, Country of Warm Snow suggests. Taylor, who grew up (and spent the pandemic) in Trinidad, has lived in New York City for many years. He often crafts poems out of conversations, distilling the