REVIEW OF “YOU ARE HERE: POETRY IN THE NATURAL WORLD”

May 09, 2024

By Elaina Friedman You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World. Ed. Ada Limón. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2024. $25.00 Walking home from a friend’s house in Seattle in the spring of 2021, I spotted a small grayish bird sitting in the middle of a busy sidewalk. It blinked its shiny black eyes fixedly toward a row of bushes as if it were waiting for something to come out, looking unbothered by the rush of commuters ...

REVIEW OF DANIELLE DUTTON’S “PRAIRIE, DRESSES, ART, OTHER”

April 26, 2024

By Rebecca Valley Dutton, Danielle. Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other. Coffee House Press, 2024. $17.95   Opening Spaces: A Review of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton    PRAIRIE When I enter Danielle Dutton’s latest book, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, the narrator is nameless. In the prairie, only plants and animals have names. And it’s this anonymous “she” that I follow into Dutton’s first ...

REVIEW OF RAISA TOLCHINSKY’S “GLASS JAW”

April 12, 2024

By Katherine James Tolchinsky, Raisa. Glass Jaw. Persea Books, 2024. $17.00. How Hard a Thing It Is to Say: On Feminist Revisioning, Vulnerability, and Touch in Raisa Tolchinsky’s Glass Jaw There’s a strong tradition in contemporary poetry (well, in contemporary literature as a whole—thanks, Margaret Atwood) of feminist revisioning. Think of Louise Glück’s Meadowlands and Averno, Rita Dove’s Mother Love, ...

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: “Mother Goose” by Jenee Skinner

April 11, 2024

Read an interview with the author here. Jeneé Skinner Mother Goose An old woman gave birth to four eggs. Gold and cradled by tree roots and ribbons inside her house. Their births were ugly, complicated by forceps and fluorescent lighting, but the loving made it worth it. Their father was more forest than man, belonging everywhere and to no one. He invited her to his pond where they swam in moonlight and ...