Tag: United States

An urgent question drives this book: what is it to speak for another? Technology today often makes us feel as if we can speak for or as another. But this is an illusion. It is crucial that we remain seriously and playfully alert to the active role our imaginings have in the shaping of what we think we know of ourselves and others. Poetry is vital to raising this awareness. “Art is puppet-like,” the poet Paul Celan observed. This collection of poems, some in formal, some in free verse, explores the ironies, humor, emotions, and visions produced by such multifaceted puppetry, its pleasures and dangers, its role in both grief and joy, in experience and recollection.

In prose poems and lineated poems, sonnets and free verse, Kathleen Brewin Lewis writes about the seasons—of the calendar year and of family life. JULY’S THICK KINGDOM moves the reader through snowstorms and thick pollen into summer’s bounty and the bittersweet beauty of fall, from her children’s childhood to her parents’ old age. “The words go on, a braided rope”—in her second chapbook, Lewis means to mark the passage of time.

In GOING PLACES, Elaine Fowler Palencia’s third poetry chapbook, she continues to explore the themes of her two collections of Appalachian fiction: identity rooted in place and family, exile and return, childhood, and lost Edens. Grounded in history and the western literary tradition, these poems bring together imagery from fairy tales, the Civil War, bluegrass music, spectral visits, Abraham Lincoln, mountaintop removal, regional speech, and Greek statuary to make surprising connections. The poetry is imbued with the grace, gentle irony, humor, and social concern of her distinctive storyteller’s voice.

Employing a clear, unflinching eye and a wry, affirmative humor, Robert J. Levy’s “All These Restless Ghosts” unfolds in a series of discursive meditations and vignettes – written in a mix of both free and formal verse – that seek to unearth the large in the small. With a meticulous intimacy and resonant music Levy mines the quotidian events of daily life, finding in the smallest of moments the most luminous of epiphanies. In lines tinged with gentle humor, he crafts poems that are at once refreshingly conversational and profoundly meditative. He engages our affectionate attention, leading us to wonder, astonishment and awe. In this volume Levy tackles the most monumental of concerns with a humane deftness, revealing an incomparable soul and a large, large heart.