It’s as Good Here as it Gets Anywhere by Greg Kosmicki
November 21, 2016
"I am grateful for the small moments and big questions in Greg Kosmicki's poems. His voice amiable, celebrating, sorrowing speaks the truths we need to hear. A poet who writes, I can hear the cars go by in the street making / that car-goes-by-in-the-street sound // that I decided finally a couple year...
Waterborne by Janet Joyner
January 2, 2016
Janet Joyner's varied poems include lyrical descriptions of the natural world and draw deft portraits of people and the complicated connections between us. Waterborne is threaded with vivid images and insights. "Sometimes they are splendid, such as fallen leaves in such a mass / it seemed the sky ...
Plunk by Tom C. Hunley
April 23, 2015
Tom C. Hunley is a professor of English at Western Kentucky University, the director of Steel Toe Books, and the vocalist/rhythm guitarist for Dr. Tom and the Cartoons He is the author of three previous full-length poetry collections, two textbooks, and six chapbooks. He is the co-editor, with Al...
Lucifer by Richard Carr
March 17, 2015
Richard Carr's Lucifer is the devil everybody knows. Mick the Bastard and Juliet are frighteningly familiar, too. Lyric reflections on wild, willful abandon, Carr's latest sequence limns a dark, doomed life with only a hint of the silver believers pray lines blue-black storm clouds when they loom o...
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...