A Review of PRAYING NAKED by Katie Condon
“Here I am/in a century that has its eyes/shut tight,” writes Katie Condon in “Origin,” the first poem in her debut collection Praying Naked (Mad Creek Books 2020). Like so many of the poems, “Origin” moves fluidly between an I and an us, between the natural world and the one created by human beings.
The Social Virtues Series
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Two Poems
A room of solitude, the world. / Out the window huffs of wind / do what they can to enunciate. You listen / like a monk. A votive hula flame.
After the Shipwreck: A Review of SIREN by Kateri Lanthier
“I sing these songs all through the dark, after everyone’s left.” The myth of the sirens has been used throughout history, to shame women or empower them, but always to warn men—women too can be dangerous. Their songs shipwrecked men, or lulled them into a vulnerable sleep, in some myths the sirens were even sent to find Persephone who had disappeared into the underworld. Kateri Lanthier’s second collection Siren, is as many-layered and multi-faceted as the myth of the sirens.
Five Stories
I worked in media monitoring for a long time. I’m talking over a decade. Ten years and two months to be exact. Boy did I know my way around media monitoring. It’s an international environment so we were gang-raping the English language every conference room we went into.
It Means Bread
The language I want to speak will be like bumper cars for the dead. It’ll grow lianas in the jungle gym. It has a wail like you’ve never heard before. There’s a flock of black storks fuming hospital in that wail.
Friend
No person who has never been the cause of another person’s death can understand the plight, which becomes the life, of the person who has. For instance—
A Review of Knock Knock by Suzanne McNear
A messy life inhabits these pages, but it’s a life that’s interesting to explore, and while it is, of course, unique, it’s also a life to which any writer can relate–a life in which the desire to tell stories and to be heard means so very, very much.
Mea Culpa
ANGELA PATTEN is author of two poetry collections, Reliquaries and Still Listening, both published by Salmon Poetry, Ireland.
House of the Animals, Work of the Lord
After he leaves the house where things fall apart, he is taken to the house with all the children, so many children. Children sleeping on the stairs, in the bathtub, children crowding one another like swine at the trough, grabbing with quick hands, children with sharp teeth and eyes that glowed yellow in the dark.
Slow Almost To Dream: A Review of The Needle by Jennifer Grotz
Jennifer Grotz’s second book of poetry . . . wears its grandeur quietly. . . . Yet out of such “traditional” fabric, Grotz weaves a unique texture of language that is patient as it is fierce, assertive in the constant reconsideration of its own utterance.
Of Them That Sold Doves
PAUL OTREMBA is the author of the poetry collections The Currency and the forthcoming Pax Americana, both from Four Way Books. His poems and reviews have recently appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Witness, the minnesota review, Southwest Review, Hotel Amerika, and The Houston Chronicle.
A Review of Darkening the Grass by Michael Miller
Michael Miller’s third book of poetry, Darkening the Grass, examines the life of a poet in his eighth decade. In sparse and vivid lyricism, these poems consider domesticity with both contentedness and urgency to cherish it.