Book Reviews
Reviewed by:
John James
A significant contribution to the ongoing dialogue on translation, Mary Jo Bang’s new version of Dante’s Inferno will certainly turn a few heads. Not only does Bang abandon the author’s renowned terza rima, she uses allusion and colloquialism to render the epic’s esoteric political backdrop accessible to today’s readers.To most Dantists, this new "translation" may purport... more
Reviewed by:
Nick Ripatrazone
Rose McLarney’s debut collection feels born of the same world as Irene McKinney’s first book, The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap. Both collections mine the grain and coarse chaff of the American pastoral, where “golden apples / glow in sheer skin,” and yet “Their weight breaks branches . . . and you fall in fruit.” McKinney moved from direct representations of her dark pastoral in later... more
Reviewed by:
Julie Marie Wade
Denise Duhamel is one of my favorite poets and one of the most captivating, comforting, challenging writers I have ever read. But because she is “established” in the genre and I am only “emerging,” I realized with some chagrin as I was reading Blowout, her newest and best poetry collection to date, that I will never have a chance to blurb one of Duhamel’s books. We are poets of two... more
Reviewed by:
Rebecca Morgan Frank
The opening section of Tanya Larkin’s debut collection, My Scarlet Ways, selected by judge Denise Duhamel for the 2011 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, sweeps us into the world of girls, but these are timeless, hell-raising girls with a kick and bite. The second poem could be read as an ars poetica of sorts: “Sisters, don’t let sisters / ride the chandelier. It’s just a Turkish... more
Reviewed by:
Virginia Konchan
The landscape of Rusty Morrison's newest poetry collection, After Urgency, is one rid not only of music but the hope of its return.From “Verdancies of repetition”:Struck again and again, destiny might never chime.Toss consonants against the vowels for luck of true correspondence.Rhyme-fellows remain distinct even at a distance, like two wings frame the jay’s flight.Harbor the hidden... more
