About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Robert Hass
Rave The New York Journal of Books ... quick, precise observations captured in short lines ... That willingness to engage in ideas—always founded in the precise observation that is the fundamental place of Hass’s aesthetic—allows him to write easily about philosophy, history, and politics ... As Robert Hass approaches his ninth decade, he is comfortable in the wisdom and craft he has learned over a long and active life in his art. But his perceptions remain young and fresh and are as vibrant as any poet’s working today.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
Positive The New York Journal of Books All questions of authenticity or appropriation disappear on the first page of Hernandez Castillo’s powerful memoir ... Castillo makes it very clear that if someone is undocumented, he or she must live with the fear of being watched ... There has been a fair amount of important discussion recently about the stories of immigration across the southern border, about how those stories should be told and who should tell them. Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Children of the Land should be at the center of that conversation.
Matthew Zapruder
Positive The New York Journal of Books ... good poems, often exceptionally good poems ... Zapruder’s language is simple and accessible, his lines short and fast, carrying the reader quickly through the poems. His syntax can get complicated at times, almost as if the poet wanted to slow the poem down to make the reader pay closer attention ... It is somewhere in the fearful and joyful fragility of love where Matthew Zapruder’s readers are brought \'to that place beyond words.\'
Nick Laird
Positive The New York Journal of Books These various attitudes toward the possibilities of language play out in interesting, often powerful ways throughout the poems ... [Laird] is one of that post-Seamus Heaney generation of writers who use the language and landscape of Northern Ireland but who look to a much larger international audience. They are a group of poets distinguished by the seriousness with which they practice their art, a seriousness that allows—as Nick Laird shows us in Feel Free—a range of emotions that can include even laughter.