Afterword: Inheritance Author’s Bio Maurya Kerr is a bay area-based writer, educator, and artist. Maurya’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue River Review, River Heron Review, Inverted Syntax, Oyster River Pages, Chestnut Review, Mason Jar Press Journal, Harbor Review, and The Future of Black: A […]
Heather White | Excerpt from DES MONSTERAS, Winner of the 2021 Vallum Chapbook Award
Excerpt from DES MONSTERAS signal bars | wi-fi | time | headphones | battery <DES MONSTERAS …….share | send To lose someone when they, or you, are still new is to lose whatever was real and also all the possibilities. In my first year my mother was often whisked to hospital. I assume that […]
PLUVIOPHILE by Yusuf Saadi | Review by Bill Neumire
Pluviophile Yusuf Saadi Nightwood Editions, 2020 Deifying rain and language, Yusuf Saadi’s debut poetry collection, Pluviophile (lover of rain), flows with a playful dedication to the music of words. In an interview with Ariel Gordon, Saadi said, “I don’t have a theory of language or understand it at all, really, but I do often find […]
RUSHES FROM THE RIVER DISAPPOINTMENT by stephanie roberts | Review by Bill Neumire
rushes from the river disappointment stephanie roberts McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020 Part way through her latest book, rushes from the river disappointment, stephanie roberts’ speaker essentializes much of the collection when she says, in “Now I Know,” “that first loss wakes the whole heart to its task / sometimes forever.” In roberts latest book, the […]
SOME LEAVES by Gary Barwin and rob mclennan | Review by Bill Neumire
SOME LEAVES Gary Barwin and rob mclennan above/ground press, 2020 In a collection with a title that rings Whitmanian, seasoned collaborators with over 50 books published between them, rob mclennan and Gary Barwin offer five brief pages of poetry that come closer to feeling very Bradburian, examining the the collision of nature and the technology […]
NOTHING YOU BUILD HERE, BELONGS HERE by Sara Cahill Marron | Review by Jonathan Harrington
Nothing You Build Here, Belongs Here Sara Cahill Marron Kelsay Books, 2021 The title of this book of poetry by Sara Cahill Marron suggests not just the provisional nature of our gig-economy servitude and the impermanence of late-stage capitalism where everything can be swept away in a moment, but also the alienation of contemporary urban […]
THE MIGRANT STATES by Indran Amirthanayagam | Review by Jonathan Harrington
THE MIGRANT STATES Indran Amirthanayagam Hanging Loose Press, 2020 Indran Amirthanayagam has published seventeen books of poetry and recorded two albums with Haitian musicians. He is both a US diplomat and a citizen of the world who writes poetry in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, French and Portuguese. From the rousing preface to the final poem […]
WHERE BEAUTY SURVIVED: AN AFRICADIAN MEMOIR by George Elliott Clarke | Review by Giovanna Riccio
WHERE BEAUTY SURVIVED: AN AFRICADIAN MEMOIR George Elliott Clarke Knopf, 2021 Renowned poet George Elliott Clarke begins each of his books of poetry with an epigraph on beauty; fittingly, then, the title of his latest book is Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir. In keeping with the former Parliamentary Poet Laureate’s lifelong preoccupation with the […]
THE ELEVENTH HOUR by Carolyn Marie Souaid | Review by Steve Luxton
The Eleventh Hour Carolyn Marie Souaid Ekstasis Editions, 2021 Both the title of Carolyn Marie Souaid’s latest collection of poetry and the book’s cover graphic—the former warning that time has all but run out, the latter depicting a burnt orange moon overhanging shadowy, monolithic industrial buildings—threaten the reader with a premonitory, possibly dispiriting literary experience. […]