REQUEENING, Amanda Moore. Ecco, HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007, 2021, 95 pages. $16.99, paper. https://www.harpercollins.com. I feel as though I’ve just read an entire life, a fat biography of a life, and there’s no real possibility that I can absorb it. And yet. Amanda Moore’s beekeeping metaphor suggests I be patient and […]
BONFIRE OPERA, Danusha Laméris. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 13250, 2020, 84 pages, $17 paper. https://upittpress.org. What on earth am I to say about this stunning collection of poems? Both elegiac (“nothing, now, but a few fistfuls of ash. Not even that, since ash / dissolves and is taken…”) and a celebration of the […]
Every April I challenge myself to read one poetry book per day—tackling all those books I’ve impulse-bought or been given by friends over the past year. Last year, I went all-out at the blog (see my post about Kathleen Flenniken for a great example), contacting many of the poets and asking questions about how their […]
Very likely it’s because I have a bad case of “want-to-escape-this-life-itis” (or maybe it’s just this news cycle), but lately, everywhere I look, I see poems about alternate lives. One that keeps surfacing is a poem from Hold Fast, “Approaching 52,” in which Holly J. Hughes imagines a self realizing “she’ll never be a lion-tamer, […]