by Peter B. Hyland | May 26, 2016
I work on a university campus and sometimes get my lunch at one of several strip mall eateries at the outskirts. There’s a pizzeria, and I was having a slice as I began Melissa Broder’s third poetry collection, Scarecrone, taking in her preamble, “Dark Poem”: Today I...
by Peter B. Hyland | May 10, 2014
The poetry of David Lehman probably shouldn’t be as good as it is. Some of its features could lead a hurried, presumptuous reader to classify the poems as the secretions of a stodgy intellectual. There are allusions to works in the Western canon aplenty....
by Peter B. Hyland | May 2, 2014
Up until the age of say fifteen, I would undergo a very particular sensation whenever I received a haircut. As the hairdresser ran her hands over my scalp, or as some part of her brushed up against my ear to position herself for the next trimming...
by Peter B. Hyland | Jul 18, 2013
You could say Dobby Gibson knows how to turn a phrase. He also knows how to vivisect a phrase; make it erupt, flex, heel, or soothe; or force it to devour itself at a moment of his choosing. If you consider Gibson’s writing more panoramically, phrase is...
by Peter B. Hyland | Jan 8, 2013
Adam Clay’s second poetry collection is a solidly built book. If it were a house, you’d rush inside to wait out a hurricane. Organized into four sections gathered behind a preamble poem, “Scientific Method,” the collection displays an impressive structural integrity....
