New Books in Poetry

In this episode, we speak with Vernon Keeve III about his book Southern Migrant Mixtape (Nomadic Press, 2018), a collection published by Nomadic Press. Memoir comes in many forms, be it poetry or prose. Keeve’s work is a bridge between both worlds. In a manner that is simultaneously universal and intimate, his book is an unflinching view at what it is to be black, queer, disenfranchised, jubilant,...

Published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2016, Nick Admussen’s exciting new book Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry explores the development of twentieth-century prose poetry within the unique political and cultural context of Communist China. In this ambitious study, Admussen attempts not only to define prose poetry but also to trace its ever-shifting role in modern Chines...

In this special episode of New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies, we are joined by two fantastic Australian poets. In her new poetic narrative, Walking with Camels: The Story of Bertha Strehlow (UWA Publishing, 2018), poet Leni Shilton takes us back to Central Australia of the 1930s to tell the story of Bertha Strehlow, one of very few white women living among Aboriginal people at the ti...

Christopher Grobe’s The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV (New York University Press, 2017) traces the ways the performance of confession permeated and transformed a wide range of media in postwar America. Grobe explores how confession—from the confessional poets of the 1960s to contemporary reality TV—is both constructed and authentic, artful even in its...

The list is the origin of culture. At least, that’s according to Umberto Eco, whose words open Liam Cole Young‘s new book, List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to Buzzfeed (Amsterdam University Press, 2017). Young follows shifting functions of the list through history, revealing a form that “mediates boundaries between administration and art, knowledge and poetics, sense and nonse...

Often, poetry and punk rock are seen as distinct activities that occur in different locations with separate audiences. Many would also ascribe to them varying levels of cultural and political capital. Daniel Kane, the author of Do You Have a Band?: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City (Columbia University Press, 2017) challenges these notions and explores the interaction between the New York Scho...

There is a long tradition of the study of Sikhism in Western academia. However, historiographical accounts still lack a clear vision of the early formation of the tradition. Rahuldeep Singh Gill, Associate Professor of Religion at California Lutheran University, addresses this lacuna in Drinking From Love’s Cup: Surrender and Sacrifice in the Vars of Bhai Gurdas Bhalla (Oxford University Press, 20...

Jackson Poetry Prize Winner Speaks Patricia Spears Jones has been writing poetry since she was twenty and then she was “good.” Today, the prolific poet is the winner of one of the most prestigious poetry prizes–the Jackson Poetry Prize. She has numerous published collections, and A Lucent Fire, New & Collected Poems (White Pines Press, 2015), is a report on the current state of everything. “Poetry...

Ever since their composition in the 13th century the poems of the Persian writer Rumi have enthralled millions of readers around the world. In Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love (Harper, 2017), Brad Gooch describes the life of their author and the path that took him from scholarship to poetry. The son of a scholar and cleric, Rumi traveled extensively as a child and enjoyed a wide-ra...

There’s a phrase that sometimes comes up among those of us who love poetry. Its called the “heresy of paraphrase.” It’s from a book published in 1947 by Cleanth Brooks titled The Well Wrought Urn, but it captures an idea that goes back to Aristotle. And this is the idea: a poem–at least a good poem–is a finally crafted work of art, and the way its crafted, the way its words are structured, is intr...

In Literature, Exile, Alterity: The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets (Academic Studies Press, 2014), Maria G. Rewakowicz explores a unique collaboration of the poets residing in the United States and writing poetry in the Ukrainian language. This research offers a systematized and chronologically organized vision of the group, which, in spite of the geographical limitations implied by its name, a...

How do we mourn those we’ve lost? What are the rituals and rites that allow us to understand our loss? To feel the measure of it? To heal, if we need healing? To reach closure, if we need closure? For any of us who have had a loved one die, these questions are personal ones. Suddenly were faced with an emptiness we cant fill and, at the same time, an often overwhelming abundance of memory and emot...

I had the pleasure of interviewing poet, Terence Degnan while he sat on a bench in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. For those unfamiliar, we refer to Sunset not as a park, but as a still slowly-morphing section of the borough. It is not difficult to find an entry point into Degnan’s writing, just as interactions with him can feel effortless. He understands the nuances of communication on and off the page an...

What is the best way to be a feminist? What is the best way to be a poet, a musician, or a painter? As a woman, what is the best way to be a friend to other women? The very idea that these water marks of success exist, goes against the nature of being biased and beautifully flawed humans who have been formed and informed by our lived experiences. Humans do not fit into neatly framed boxes. We are...

The “coming of age narrative” will never lose its allure because we are constantly drawn back to the moments that shaped us into the adults we are today. Nostalgia, many argue, is the most powerful human emotion. It not only memorializes eras but intermingles fact with memory and emotion we even remember the feelings memory elicits and the realities we longed for. In My Bedside Radio (Deadly Chaps...

In Pull Yourself Together: The Gena Rowlands Poems (Dancing Girl Press, 2106), Amanda Deutch reminds us of the current and historic importance of the muse. Something draws writers the page, painters to the canvas, and musicians to their instruments. Sometimes it is subtle, sometimes urgent. A self-proclaimed cinefile, Deutch stayed up into the early morning hours watching 70s films and drafting he...

Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) by Jonathan Brooks Platt explores the national celebrations around the centennial anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937. Platt structures his book around the dichotomy of what he sees as two different approaches to temporalities and modernity: monumentalism and eschatology, which c...

Where personal history and shared history intersect, we are left with the figures of memory and myth. These poems seek to reclaim the portions of personal history where we were mere spectators of our lives and the parts of cultural history that define us, even now, without our consent. But what about the figures of myth that once walked the earth? What right do we have to ownership, what bond can...

I am not going to lie to you, dear reader, this collection will require you to be fully present. With each layer of the speaker that is revealed, you will shed a layer of yourself. This revealing will bring you knee to knee, eye to eye–two bodies recognizing one another as cosmic dust. What do we allow to confuse this empyrean understanding of one another and of ourselves? we’re what they call a t...

Now in its fifth printing of a very short life, Ashaki Jackson’s Surveillance examines the relationship between acts of violence, the witnessing of violence, the witnessing of the witnessing of violence, and the internalization of all three. Media offers no escape from trauma, instead it creates a cyclical nature where the traumatized are re-traumatized and forced to live out fear after dread afte...

  With a genre-bending hybridity that Czerwiec is well-known for, Sweet/Crude: A Bakken Boom Cycle (Gazing Grain Press, 2016) takes the structure of a heroic crown of sonnets and retrofits it for the prose poem and lyric essay. The repetition throughout entrances the reader into the dream state of industrial dystopia that one might find Orwellian but Czerwiec knew as home. The question and answer...

After the enormity of our loss had been calculated, Guzman started writing. Drawn to the page to process his grief and to understand in the best way poets know how, through their art. This chapbook does more than encapsulate the memory of a community, it links that community to a single life and to a larger struggle. /I am afraid of attending places that celebrate our bodies because that’s also wh...

We commonly think of Walt Whitman as the great American poet, the gray-bearded bard who captures the democratic music of our country with, as he called it, his “barbaric yawp.” And, sure enough, Whitman thought of himself this way. “I hear America singing” he famously wrote in the fourth edition of Leaves of Grass. What’s less commonly know is that Whitman had a very clear idea as to how a poet sh...

Emily Dickinson is no ordinary poet. Her intelligent and profound work inspires a fierce attachment in those who love it. I know this first-hand. My wife began reading Dickinson soon after we first met and took to the poems so deeply that, a little over a decade later, she published a book about Dickinson’s spiritual life. What that meant for me–in addition to admiring her writing–was that for ove...

My grandmother, who’s now ninety-eight, lived most of her life in a little town in Southwestern Ohio called Waynesville. The town has reinvented itself in the last few years as a destination for antiquers wiling to pay top-dollar for what she might call junk, but when she was there the town was the small center of a lot of small family farms, including her own. In her years there, she helped run t...