PositiveRain TaxiSally Wen Mao’s collection Oculus sets out to examine the connections between the gaze and how technology has blurred the definition of sight, making it possible to see without truly seeing ... Creating a hybrid diary-critique in the voice of Anna May Wong, Mao shows the past is not antique or irrelevant, but an ongoing excavation that is always revealing new layers ... a sensorial and emotional overload that will disturb the reader in provocative ways.
Sam Sax
RaveMediumSam Sax’s bury it completes the contemporary trinity of confessional poetry...the speaker in Sax’s collection opens his wounds afresh and offers them to the reader for examination, laying bare the disappointments and pain within the Jewish diaspora and contemporary society at large. The epigraph from James Fenton on the role of epitaphs sets a strong tone for the collection — Sax’s poems are blunt and painful enough to serve as a eulogy but soothing and pleading enough to function as a diary that the reader was invited to glimpse ... bury it, is a collection that gives its reader endless reasons for admiration. From individual lines that one can collect and admire like small gems, to whole poems that are worth framing and imprinting in the memory, Sax is wickedly clever with his use of language and imagery.
