Summer Farah | Critic at Large This essay is also available as a print zine through Open Books. All proceeds will be sent to Gaza Poets Society. The Arab Apocalypse by Etel Adnan Litmus Press, 2007 First Published by Post-Apollo Press, 1989 Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha University of California Press, 2022 First Published by Tanam Press, 1982 In a Western Art History course, I learned to read images—to follow the eye, from the top left corner to the bottom right as if I was reading a page of words in English, but to let the artists’ lines guide and redirect my focus. To understand wh ..read more

by Philip Sorenson | Contributing Writer Hydra Medusa Brandon Shimoda Nightboat Books, 2023 Last May, on the 125th anniversary of the court case that established birthright citizenship, Donald Trump reaffirmed his plans to end this constitutional protection. Trump’s promise to revoke birthright citizenship, to further advance or entrench the United States’ white supremacist project is, to be sure, unsurprising. It is clear to me—and, probably, to you—that the state’s guarantee of rights is also a guarantee of the state’s ability to revoke those rights. Thus, our humanity becomes a legal ficti ..read more

by Tyler Barton | Contributing Writer The Book By Mary Ruefle Wave Books, 2023   Dear Unknown Friend. That’s how I addressed the first letter I wrote to Mary Ruefle. It was a reference to “Are We Alone? Is it Safe to Speak?”—an epistolary poem in her 2013 collection, Trances of the Blast.”  The unknown friend: I’d become obsessed with that idea. It served a reminder of possibility, that the world was full of people and creatures and quiet places that might become companions. During the pandemic, when real friends felt far away and increasingly unfamiliar, especially when seen throug ..read more

Dujie Tahat | Critic at Large A Shiver in the Leaves by Luther Hughes BOA Editions, 2022 If you were familiar with Seattle before the last decade—before the effects of global climate collapse so forcefully imposed themselves onto our little corner of the world, where unprecedented wildfires raging across the western slope of the Cascades now give us smoke season in October when, before, a different kind of gray, overcast and cold, used to settle in—then you know that the cliché “it’s always raining in Seattle” is overblown. What people who’d never been to The Town unknowingly meant when th ..read more

by Sam Robison | Contributing Writer Iggy Horse By Michael Earl Craig Wave Books, 2023   Reminding us that play is as rigorous and suitable an impulse for a book of poems as any, Michael Earl Craig’s sixth collection Iggy Horse pulls readers into a strange, slightly hazy world of impossible observations, barely understandable jokes, and dazzling—or confounding, or surrealist, or uncanny—scenery. In this eighty-odd-page collection just out from Wave Books, bits of cheese parlay with talking owls and ornate cocktails. Horses, capable of deep knowing, stride alongside animate eyeglasses, my ..read more

by Cody Stetzel | Contributing Writer Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrowby Natalka Bilotserkivets (translated by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky) Lost Horse Press, 2021 Pray to the Empty Wellsby Iryna Shuvalova (translated by Olena Jennings & Iryna Shuvalova) Lost Horse Press, 2019 Survival is a concept, borne of a need for communication, that must emerge only after threat has already permeated a group’s understanding of itself. Though, conceptually, survival certainly predates communication, individual survival instincts and the group dynamic of staying alive together produce ..read more

Mark Spero | Contributing Writer If This Is the Age We End DiscoveryRosebud Ben-Oni Alice James Books, 2021 Winner of the 2019 Alice James Award Rosebud Ben-Oni’s collection If This Is The Age We End Discovery, taking on the largest questions about space, time, and the reality of our existence, enters an underappreciated lineage of work that mixes science and poetry.  It may seem that science and poetry are unrelated, but writers have long been attracted to the sciences: Lewis Carroll and Omar Khayyam were mathematicians, and Nabokov studied butterflies.  In his book on string ..read more

by Esther Lin | Contributing Writer If Some God Shakes Your HouseJennifer Franklin Four Way Books, 2023 As a woman comes to terms with the cruelties enacted on her body, larger cruelties descend. The Trump administration incarcerates children. Half the country is in quarantine. Roe v. Wade is struck down. Jennifer Franklin’s third book of poems, If Some God Shakes Your House, is an outpouring of grief for the last decade: We demand justice, we are refused. We fight, we are defeated. We live and we lose. The speakers of this book are not newcomers to disaster. One is Antigone: the luckless ..read more

by David Roderick | Contributing Writer Lying In by Elizabeth Metzger Milkweed Editions, 2023 For the title of her new book of poems, Elizabeth Metzger borrows a phrase used to describe the practice of bed rest during or after a mother’s pregnancy. “Lying in” is recommended by an OB-GYN when regular activity could threaten the health of mother or child. Probably for many pregnant women, bed rest is a tedious, restrictive affair. Metzger uses it as a site of creative agency and deep meditation. In fact, I’ve read many contemporary poetry collections inspired by early motherhood and can’t r ..read more

by Sarah Giragosian | Contributing Writer Breath on a Coal By Anne Haven McDonnell Middle Creek Publishing, 2022   The title of Anne Haven McDonnell’s debut collection, Breath on a Coal, is drawn from Jean Valentine’s “Home,” a poem she has “loved for years and carried like a talisman on the back of [her] tongue.” For Haven McDonnell, the “intimacy” of breath “keeps an ember of hope smoldering and warm. Poetry can also carry such breath.”  Reckoning with the crises of our time— environmental, social and political—Haven McDonnell considers poetry to be a language of inquiry that acco ..read more