RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe tighter breaks are a jolt, a seatbelt catching, to counteract the breathless urgency of longer lines in long, dense poems that tend to rush ahead with many ands and ampersands, dashes and ellipses and few periods ... A runaway intelligence ... Jorie Graham, in her work, seems to honor this same life force, the singular point of view of one consciousness, or from one consciousness — the view from inside a skull.
Louise Glück
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewGlück’s intensity repelled me when I first encountered her work, as a student ... Now that I’m older, have suffered more and realize my life is likely more than half over, it’s her seriousness, her coldness, that appeals. Some days, and in the dark intervals between days, it seems to me that Glück’s preoccupations are what poetry is for, that poems are confrontations with the void ... Glück has become a true poet of the void ... [Winter Recipes] is quite brief, only 15 poems, and gives an impression of exhaustion, as though language and material have been nearly depleted ... Here, as in her last book, the poems often feel like fables or strange little fictions, positing characters with unclear relation to the poet ... The book is full of echoes of her earlier work, its winds (the breath of the void) and silence.
Don Mee Choi
PositiveThe New York Times... intimidatingly messy at a glance, containing prose blocks, verse, something like a short absurdist play, sketches, collaged and annotated photos, images of handwritten Korean characters on ruled paper. The opening passages are written in a flat, approachable dispatch style ... I like books that feel notebooky, as if I were transgressing the author’s private property ... The horror in Ahn’s story is so compressed it’s almost darkly funny ... excess as a corrective.
Carolyn Forché
PositiveThe New York Review of BooksIt is perhaps more accurate to call the book crisis poetry rather than climate poetry. Forché is more attuned to the suffering of the people living through climate crisis now, elsewhere on the globe, than the imagined, projected suffering of our own children and grandchildren who might live to see similar conditions right here ... This book is a stern kind of elegy—this is our fault, we let it get too late—with none of the confessional shame of The Shore. Her approach is much less personal; you have to look for her in these poems ... Though they’re not joy-driven, the poems aren’t joyless either. Here objects of nature have mystical power, an aura, and there is pleasure just in naming them precisely. Many poems contain these lists of objects, lists of labels that need no further explanation or embellishment ... But there is, at times, in place of survivor’s guilt or self-flagellation, a touch of self-righteousness ... (I read somewhere recently that language poetry is smug—but all poetry is smug, I thought.)
Alice Notley
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe book’s a kind of game, a text-based adventure ... Though the situation’s murky, the syntax estranging, the form itself is familiar, for most of the book: left-justified lines, grouped into stanzas. But between these are several visual poems, much weirder to the eye ... The satisfaction of “solving” these puzzles, or finding possible solutions, offers relief from the mystery of the rest, which might be unsolvable — much like the real problems (climate disaster, ecological collapse) the book imagines us living, or not living, after ... If the book sounds maddening, it often is. It seems frustrated with itself ... this book also annoys me deeply ... There’s a certain corniness to the whole sci-fi setup, One’s journey in the glyph ... There’s too much pre-existing scenery and special effects in our minds to imagine this world up from scratch.
Mary Ruefle
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn Dunce, her latest poetry collection, Ruefle confronts the extraordinary yet banal fact that all of us die. How do we reconcile the boringness of death-in-general with the shock of our own, specific death? ... Ruefle’s mother’s death haunts this collection — it feels as if her death itself is the ghost, the event and not the person ... The ostensible occasions of Ruefle’s poems are minor: not the funeral, but the bath. They record small moments with sweeping scope, moments in which the speed of thought seems to outpace real time ... Dunceis full of...linguistic reversals — the chiasmus may be the device that best represents life’s reversal of fortune, our built-in obsolescence. The comedian Steven Wright once joked that everyone dies instantly: \'It’s the only way you can die. You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive, then you’re dead.\' Ruefle knows this too.
Brenda Shaughnessy
PositiveThe New York TimesAt times this book almost wallows in guilt, in the performance of self-flagellation. \'Tell myself the weather ruined my plans, though it’s me ruined the weather’s,\' Shaughnessy writes in one poem, and, in another, \'I’m ashamed of us all\' ... It feels like a challenge to the reader: Chew on this, chumps. We made this hell and now we have to sleep in it; it’s \'well-deserved.\' Are these poems preachy? Do we deserve a poetry that isn’t preachy? And what’s the alternative? ... If they are often bleak, Shaughnessy’s poems are also very funny ... Shaughnessy can also write the kind of line that is confusing in its beauty, whose beauty exceeds its sense, which is the thing I go to poetry for — lines that can be read and reread without exhausting their potential meaning.
A.E. Stallings
RaveThe New York Review of BooksIn her fourth collection, Like, A.E. Stallings, an American poet, classicist, and translator who lives in Greece, demonstrates facility with poetic forms of all types. Like includes examples of the villanelle, the epigram, the sestina, ottava rima, and, of course, the sonnet, of which there are several, some taking more liberties than others ... Stallings may be so immersed in form that her thoughts arrive already dressed in it—or maybe they arrive formless, but she so enjoys the game of arranging those thoughts into patterns of meter and rhyme that almost any occasion will do. She moves freely between the mythic and the quotidian, between epic and modest scales.
Terrance Hayes
RaveThe New York Review of Books\"There can be no question as to the timeliness of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Terrance Hayes’s seventh book—it’s a collection of poems written during the first two hundred days of Donald Trump’s presidency ... Hayes too seems to be having fun, treating the writing... as a kind of play, although his subject matter is frequently devastating ... Hayes writes, \'This country is mine as much as an orphan’s house is his.\' He could mean both America and the sonnet. Stuck in temporary, haunted, inhospitable housing, you might decide to have fun, to inhabit it as fully as possible for as long as you’re there.\
