Book Review

Yield Architecture

I loved reviewing Jake Syersak’s debut poetry collection, Yield Architecture for Colorado Review:

Yield Architecture, the debut full-length collection from Jake Syersak, is an unyielding investigation of how linguistic and material structures intersect to shape one’s perception of reality. “Yield” here connotes both productivity and acquiescence: the measured output of machine and human as well as the softening of resolve, the point at which one gives in to a structure rather than resisting it. A poem, of course, both yields to and yields its own architecture: revising, incorporating, and resisting forms and ghosts of forms that necessarily populate it. Read the rest.

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The Beast That Therefore I Am

image of beast

The Beast That Therefore I Am by Kristin George Bagdanov

Eight poetry collections published in the past four years turn to the beast as an alternative way of inhabiting the world. This beastly turn has ontological, political, and aesthetic implications for how we theorize the relationship between poetry and personhood (and all of its Enlightenment-era baggage). This review explores both the impetuses and outcomes of these beast-filled encounters but stops short of offering a grand theory of “the beast,” as such a move would undermine the motivating reasons for embodying and embracing beasts as kin.

READ THE REST AT JACKET2

Review of Barely Composed by Alice Fulton

My latest review for Colorado Review:

“The title of this collection encapsulates the way these poems combine honest vulnerability with an almost unraveled, or unraveling, sense of urgency for the self and the world—as if in poetry we are only able to barely eek out the poem before the stakes shift and the poem with it, the poet trailing off behind.”

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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.