Grief, Memory, and Language: A Review of Victoria Chang’s OBIT
Victoria Chang’s collection, Obit, seems to have anticipated the prolonged good-byes of 2020. In it, Chang says good-bye to loved ones, feelings, objects—everything we feel and know, who we were and where we’re heading—especially when someone we love is dying, and our sense of awareness is heightened.
The Social Distance Reading Series
Recent Posts
What Comes Alive Through Death: A Review of Jill Bialosky’s Collection ASYLUM
This stunning book-length poem, broken up into 103 sections, examines the grief and trauma associated with losing a young sister from suicide. Threaded also through these lyrics is a conversation with Paul Celan’s Selected Poems and Dante’s Inferno.
Three Poems
The shoemaker labors over his leather, his work./A singular lightbulb illuminates his hands, like a ner tamid,
Three Poems
Hallmark does not make a card for this/for what we mean to each other,/for what we do when my kids are asleep./We are not married. Not husband and wife.
Four Poems
All my registers say hush/A spider pushes each ounce of knowledge against the ground/Her hydraulic soldiers
Two Poems
this is how they work together in her mind/at a proper distance from each other
A Review of HOLD ME TIGHT by Jason Schneiderman
Hold Me Tight by Jason Schneiderman is a book of five sections that vary in style, tone, and form — it is a book of fables, fantasies, and hilarious futures.
A Conversation
The moon does not/want to be touched. /How do I know? /The goats this morning
Four Poems
A lover’s sleeping body is a fallow field / leading to forest understory, saplings / and shrubberies too plentiful to count,
Teeth and Breadcrumbs: A Review of THE CLEARING by Allison Adair
The opening title poem of Allison Adair’s collection The Clearing transforms a recognizable fairy tale into a grim story of a man who may be a “prince or woodcutter or brother, now musty with beard,” all familiar tropes of the genre, and who collects teeth that the girl in the story has dropped instead of breadcrumbs.
Two Poems
the five quarts of my blood moving almost/four miles an hour means the nurse pushing/a morphine shot into my arm watches/my eyes not the needle seconds only
Devotion and Defiance: A Review of Leila Chatti’s DELUGE
In this stunning debut collection of poetry, Leila Chatti, a citizen of both the United States and Tunisia, brings together a variety of topics that, historically, have not oft been talked about—not in public and not in poems—and when they have arisen, they have often come bearing shame.