Book Review

Review of Fossils in the Making

Madeleine Wattenberg, Assistant Editor of the Cincinnati Review has written a thoughtful and compelling review of Fossils in the Making. Here is just one of the many insights she has into the book: 

The final poem, fittingly named “echo / o” turns on its internal sounds; “o” is, after all, the symbol for Oxygen, the gyre’s center, the mark of invocation. The invocation is to anyone—or anything—that is listening. Bagdanov encourages us to make our attempts but also recognize that these attempts are folded within other bodies, that we both carry and are carried by the gyre’s currents. And if our making is an undoing, then perhaps our undoing will be our making too.

Read the rest here.

Review of Sunday Rising

Patricia Clark’s fourth collection of poetry, Sunday Rising, alternates between these skyward and groundward gazes to show us where they meet, and how, in fact, they are the same wonder-filled and bewildered perspective, that light “enter[s] the river with the same / intensity of burning / we see in life at its peak, / or life with the flame / threatening to go out.”

Read more of my review of Patricia Clark’s 4th poetry collection at the Colorado Review.