Roadside Prophet by Grizz McIntosh
September 26, 2014
From the author: "Roadside Prophet is a chronicle of road trips, mind trips and cross-country mayhem. The great thing about roads is potential. The street right outside your house can ultimately take you to the Arctic Circle or the southernmost tip of Tierra del Fuego. It's all connected by roads....
Words Like Rain: A Celebration of Poetry
September 26, 2014
When a group of creative people comes together - bursting with ideas and exuberance - they feed off one another, challenging each other to defy gravity and reach for the sky. Maybe it's nothing more spectacular than some great instructors and some gifted students feeding off each other like sharks wi...
Connecticut Shade by Timothy Black
September 24, 2014
"Tim Black's Connecticut Shade is a 21st Century meta-Howl. Written as an antidote for writer's block, it unleashes an interior satirical rampage through the drug-afflicted, sex-crazed American Dream gone sour. An assault on hollow materialism, it is also an attempted re-unification of the schizoid Ame...
Fist City by Dan Memmolo
March 24, 2013
The love child of Gogol and Walt Whitman, Dan Memmolo writes with the absurdist sensibility of the one and the all-embracing love of the other. Sure, life s silly, say these splendid poems, ain t it grand? The music of Elvis and Marvin Gaye (and Sinatra and Tchaikovsky) thrum beneath the surface here,...
Where to Start by Samuel Stenger Renken
March 1, 2011
Now, after more than a few years away from his early home in the Nebraska Sandhills, Sam has put together his first book-length collection of poems, and it pleases me that so many of them, in a variety of ways and degrees, reveal connections to the writer s upbringing. --William Kloefkorn, Neb...
In a House Made of Time by William Kloefkorn & David Lee
July 20, 2010
William Kloefkorn has published more than twenty collections of poetry, among them Alvin Turner As Farmer and Drinking the Tin Cup Dry. His work has appeared in periodicals including Prairie Schooner, Harper's, and North American Review. He was an emeritus professor of English at Nebraska Wesleyan in...
My Shtetl by Robert Cooperman
March 24, 2010
Open to any poem in Robert Cooperman's My Shtetl and be so delighted you won't want to put the book down. Much more comes alive here than one man s childhood Brooklyn neighborhood, its Yiddish flavors, its tales of a family of American Jews who don t look, no different from real folks. He may have ...
Getting By by Gary Lark
October 1, 2009
These are poems of fierce candor and compassion. In blunt, plain-spoken language, they chronicle a life lived on the fringes: a rural Oregon boyhood and a working life spent variously as a laborer, a janitor, a hospital orderly, a National Guardsman, an outreach librarian . . . With precise detai...
Octopus by Tom C. Hunley
September 1, 2008
I don't know if this book, Octopus, has eight arms but it has several: tender but completely unsentimental poems about children and marriage; angry poems and poems of deep gratitude; poems both comic and dark (often simultaneously); and maybe most of all a clear, original, passionate American voi...
Cut River by Amy McInnis
February 1, 2007
I get the same pleasure from reading Amy McInnis's Cut River that I do from looking at the intricate construction of a bird's nest, or in hearing a hidden vireo singing at the top of a tree; her poems have that same unerring now-ness and clarity. "The woods should have a different name at night, some...
Interstices by Laurelyn Whitt
May 1, 2006
Laurelyn Whitt's poems have appeared in various journals, including The Spoon River Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, The Malahat Review, and Poetry Canada Review. She is the author of two prize-winning chapbooks, Words for Relocation (Will Hall Press, 2001) and a long dream of difference (Frith Press...
Gutter Flowers by Don Welch
August 1, 2005
Don Welch moves among the poor like a modern day Whitman who has mastered the fine art of pruning. The poor, he says, "need the dump and truck of love / to walk on too." With a minimum of words he evokes a maximum of feelings and sympathies. The rest of us need the poet's words to bring us those plac...