RaveRhinoTheir subjects are familiar— cats, dogs, horses, the landscape, family, lovers, the wistful longing for children, the body’s betrayals. But their span is generous. In these poems, Limón is always aware of how language/the poem is not the destination—rather, it’s what comes back and offers the opportunity for openings into further possibility.
Rick Barot
RaveRHINOLooking at the past, one is prone to romanticizing it, viewing it through the lens of nostalgia. But Barot’s mindful approach of mixing the long view with the closeup and vice versa tempers this tendency as well as gives evidence of the maturity of his own relationship with recurrent themes—notably, how art/poetry/language may or may not provide logic or consolation for human suffering—carried through his previous books ... The Galleons, rich with somber beauty and insight, concludes that the spinning threads in the vortex of history are after all made by ordinary bodies: they engender complex lineages, loves, wars, sorrows, triumphs, and losses ... Making is thinking, and the catalog of ordinary actions across the centuries is far from prosaic. Great empires were built from them, but who knows how many of such stories were lost like foam somewhere along the way? Rick Barot’s The Galleons carries some of these lovingly back to us.
Ilya Kaminsky
RaveRhino Poetry... poems of searing observation, trembling beauty, and power ... it is a testament to Kaminsky’s great skill and maturity as a poet that it’s not just the shrouds of anger or despair that follow the reader out of each cell of the Deaf Republic.
Sally Wen Mao
RaveRhino Poetry... ambitious ... has a stunning sequence of poems in the voice of Anna May Wong ... heartbreaking and unforgettable poems ... a short but intensive course on the different and necessary technologies of dismantling the omnivorous eye.
