Tag: Contemporary

“In the Shadow of Paradise” by Jane Ellen Glasser opens with an epigraph by Rumi, “The wound is the place where the light enters you,” a theme resonant throughout her seventh collection. Subjects such as romantic love, aging, disappointment and death are examined through a lens of understanding that loss is both inevitable and necessary in growing a full life. In her poem “Cracks,” she reminds us, “Every scar/ is the shorthand/ of an important story,” each crack “…a door opening/ onto a larger room.” A signature of her work, Glasser views nature as a mirror for human nature. Swallowtails hovering above phlox suggest that “…pleasure/ can only be tasted in small sips.” Another source of inspiration is art. Works by Rousseau, Chagall, Picasso, Rubens are springboards for self-examination. With wisdom harvested by time, the overriding tone of her collection is one of praise, celebrating a life “happily flawed.”

The poems in DAMAGED LITTLE CREATURES remind us that we can never remake ourselves entirely; we are distilled through the experiences that shape our early selves In direct and spare language, Sevick’s heartrending poems achieve moments of grace and transcendence as they unravel delicate childhood memories, probe complex issues of identity, and wrestle with the impossible work of marriage and parenting.

CARNIVAL celebrates the quirky, the odd, and an audience of participants and voyeurs. The first section contains linked poems that focus on small towns’ annual festivals. The second, “Sideshows,” looks at fictional, mythic, and real characters from a speculative angle. The third, “The Traveling Circus,” centers on one of mankind’s oldest entertainments. CARNIVAL unleashes a vibrant and revolutionary spirit in poems that favor a skewed vision: sometimes effervescent, often dark.

Divided into three parts, Michael Trocchia’s debut collection of verse is a lyric study on the forms of fate, a haunting discourse on the linguistic fractures between one’s self and substance, and a set of shimmering images and meditations on the constant “guesswork” of understanding the world within us and beyond. The immediacy and sonic play of these poems are met by what is their gravity of thought and, in some, their philosophic irony. Attending to both the magic and logic of our language, Trocchia’s poetry draws the two together, renewing the wonder of existence with greater clarity.