Arbor (NMP, 2007) Melissa Ginsburg’s 2007 collection from New Michigan Press, Arbor, reads as a dream journal fraught with subtle narrative woven from scene to scene with quietude, precision, and matter-of-fact strangeness. These often fantastical vignettes are unadorned with any conspicuous prosody, but the observations made within and the contemplative honesty of each line allows [...]

Vivisection (New Michigan Press, 2010) Eric Weinstein cuts from the opening scene of Vivisection’s first poem through the exquisitely quiet apocalyptic and cosmic scenes of the final one, checking the range of the “minute or pitiless examination or criticism” (Merriam-Webster) with the work of this collection. He writes physical operations into his verse in ways [...]

Inventory of Sleeping Things (Maverick Duck Press, 2010) What I’m about to do is unwise, but it can’t be helped: one of the blurbs for Inventory of Sleeping Things caught my eye. Jack Ridl, another poet, and a professor at Hope College, my alma mater, wrote: “We often turn to poems…to experience the complexity and [...]

An Easy Place / To Die (CityLit Press, 2010) After Hurricane Katrina, two poets and friends, Vincent Cellucci and Ben Lowenkron, returned to drowned and quarantined New Orleans. The hurricane, the forsaken city, the destruction that, with its huge number of dead and homeless, seemed to bring Katrina out from behind the weather veil as [...]

The Book of Evil by Jason Bredle (Dream Horse Press, 2011) Jason Bredle’s collection

Here’s how this works: every Monday and Wednesday for the rest of June we’ll post two short reviews of poetry collections or chapbooks. The reviewers are MFA students at Emerson, the poets & publishers are generally unsung, and each post will with any luck send you careening toward new voices and bodies and catalogs of [...]

I have acquired 16 poetry collections/chapbooks since late December. There are four weeks in June. Each week, in a yet-undetermined number of posts (but I guess

In a fanatical tumble across the page, poems from Benjamin Lowenkron’s new poetry collection, Preacher’s Blues, dig troughs between lines and images. The end of “Sky Spider” reads, by the city on the banks of Bone River a colony of spiders came ashore with dawn                                                   tomorrow we will all be                pretty silk tombs This has a [...]

What Greying Ghost Press sent me, in the order I removed it (as best I can remember) from a manilla envelope, a few days after I ordered Peter Berghoef’s[1] enveloped pamphlet Hank Williams, containing the poem “Hank Williams”[2]: 1. Page from LIFE magazine’s 22 April 1940 article about NYC’s then-District Attorney and Republican presidential hopeful, [...]

Emerson Alumnus John Cotter has recently released his first book, a novel entitled Under the Small Lights. Last week I had the pleasure of not only speaking with John Cotter, but hearing him read, and let me just say right now – John Cotter is an incredible reader. If you ever get a chance to [...]