Tag: Poetry

Essay on Deprivation

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without a pot to piss in a rifle fires a caw of crows on cardboard on tents white wax burns the fingers god spits the residue the air shatters prayers candles made of glass moths bite to chase starlight casualties grow the rack holes of winter sweaters bark beetles eat the wooden floors backlogged services old brochures for caskets the mortuary is full a child is forced to hug hang barbwire another crunches on pixels of affection a band of copper horses trots down a polluted trail of power the clack of their steel hooves cracks con- crete silver dollars […]

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That I Should Stop Searching for Whoever I Was Before: ‘True Mistakes’ by Lena Moses-Schmitt

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The poems of Lena Moses-Schmitt’s new collection, True Mistakes (96 pages; University of Arkansas Press), feature those gaps of perception in which what is obvious or straightforward becomes supplanted by the relentless onslaught of experience. A finalist for the 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, the collection traces that which we so often miss or move past in a hurry, and grounds us in a new mode of witness—where, “Like the sun, I can only look at you/when I don’t look.” Moses-Schmitt’s dazzling poems center the importance of carefully wrought introspection in negotiating the distance between writing and living. In its […]

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The Sorrow and the Fury: ‘Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece’ by Nasser Rabah

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“And I’m delirious: Gaza… Gaza,” Palestinian poet Nasser Rabah writes, the echo of grief shadowing the speaker’s cries. Written as he endured the genocidal assault, Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece (192 pages; City Lights Books) resounds with gripping humanity, as his poems of love, the dead, and an accompanying fierce valuation of life evoke realities that often evade propaganda and the mass media. Rabah’s first collection in translation is a bilingual edition translated by Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal, and Khaled Al-Hilli, and offers a powerful introduction to his lyrical work in English. The poet’s language is marked by […]

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Seeing the Meaning: ‘The Collected Poems of Mary Ellen Solt’

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Concrete poetry, a literary arts movement started in the 1950s, is meant to reflect the material inspiring a poem through its emphasis on reduced language. One of the movement’s leaders, and one of its few American female contributors, was Mary Ellen Solt (1920-2007). Solt used the form to reject previous examples of prose poems and focus instead on creating work that was “communicating” to the reader its physical form and structure before its content could, thus bringing a poem closer to its words true meaning. Solt would edit the landmark 1968 anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View, which was published […]

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‘Trace Evidence’ by Charif Shanahan: Worlds Apart

by Valerie Braylovskiy

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Trace Evidence (93 pages; Tin House Press) is the second collection of poetry by Charif Shanahan, author of Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing. These poems use language and form to peel back elements of Shanahan’s identity and show how markers like nationality, race, and sexuality intersect within one’s lived experience. The poems feel deeply personal yet rooted in the universal as Shanahan raises profound questions about human nature and what it means to feel displaced in the world. Born in the Bronx to an Irish American father and Moroccan mother, Shanahan— a professor at Northwestern University— discusses his […]

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‘Meltwater’ by Claire Wahmanholm: Mother, Earth

by Zoe Binder

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Claire Wahmanholm’s latest poetry collection, Meltwater (128 pages; Milkweed Editions), is both a lament for the Earth as it suffers the harmful effects of climate change and a poignant reminder of the joys that make life worthwhile despite this loss. Wahmanholm centers the collection on two recurring series of poems—“Glacier” and “Meltwater”—that follow the anxieties of a person raising children on our threatened planet. In “Glacier,” the speaker battles feelings of grief at the sight of a calving glacier—and guilt at the thought of children experiencing a world without these geological formations: I am trying to say it’s too late […]

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‘Feast’ by Ina Cariño: Food for Thought

by Gus Berg

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Ina Cariño, the recipient of a 2022 Whiting Award and a 2021 Alice James Award, is a Filipinix American poet whose work draws heavily on intergenerational nourishment and transformation in marginalized communities. Feast (100 pages; Alice James Books), their first book of poetry, is an enriching collection that satisfies a primal hunger for fulfillment while questioning the social conditions that leave people of color deprived. One of the most disarming things about Feast is the bone-deep rawness of this poet’s voice. Even as they veer away from the realm of possibility, the poems feel real because the speaker’s voice remains […]

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‘An Ordinary Life’ by B.H. Fairchild: The Winding Road of Grief

by Gus Berg

Posted on by Zack Ravas

In his latest poetry collection, An Ordinary Life (67 pages; W. W. Norton), B.H. Fairchild, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the author of the collections The Art of the Lathe (1998) and Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2002) , doesn’t flinch from the foxholes remembered secondhand in “My Father, Fighting the Fascists in WWII” or from images of a Korean War veteran bagging canned goods without fingers in “Groceries.” Fairchild offers succinct commentary with discrete but vivid imagery, honoring the beauty of small-town scenes with artistry and exactitude, transforming even a Walmart on […]

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Q&A with Rebecca Foust: ‘Only’ & Communicating Across the Centuries

by Meryl Natchez

Posted on by Zack Ravas

I first met Rebecca Foust when we worked together for Marin Poetry Center starting in 2014. Foust is the author of seven poetry collections, including The Unexploded Ordnance Bin, Paradise Drive, All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song, and God, Seed. Her work has received the  2020 Pablo Neruda Award, the 2017 CP Cavafy Award,  and the 2016 James Hearst Poetry Prize, and was runner up for the 2022 Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. In 2017 she was appointed Marin County Poetry Laureate. I have been intrigued by her new book of poems, Only (Four Way Books 2022; 88 pages), a varied, tender, […]

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Q&A with Tayi Tibble

by Craig Santos Perez

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Tayi Tibble, whose first book of poems, Poūkahangatus, was published by Knopf this year, is an exciting and essential voice of the next generation of Pacific Islander authors. Of indigenous Māori descent, Tibble grew up in Porirua, north of Wellington in Aotearoa (New Zealand), where Poūkahangatus was first published by Victoria University Press in 2018. (Her poetry also appeared in ZYZZYVA No. 123.) The concept of whakapapa—the Māori term for genealogy—is an important part of her collection. More than a simple list of names, whakapapa is a core element of mātauranga Māori, or traditional Māori knowledge. It articulates the living […]

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Air Sirens Wailed: Q&A with Maria Galina and Arkady Shtypel

by Ilya Kaminsky

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Visiting Odesa, Ukraine, this July, I met with Maria Galina and Arkady Shtypel, two well-known Russian-language poets who decided to leave Moscow for Odesa before the war began. Maria Galina is the author of several books of fiction, including the novels Little Boondock, Mole-Crickets, and Iramifications, which was published in English by GLAS New Russian Writing. She is also a prize-winning poet and literary critic and a regular columnist for the literary journal Novyi Mir. Arkady Shtypel‘s debut poetry collection was published when he was fifty-eight. Since then, he has published five more books of poetry. He is also a […]

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My California

by Lee Herrick

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Here, an olive votive keeps the sunset lit, the Korean twenty-somethings talk about hyphens, graduate school, and good pot. A group of four at a window table in Carpinteria discuss the quality of wines in Napa Valley versus Lodi. Here, in my California, the streets remember the Chicano poet whose songs still bank off Fresno’s beer-soaked gutters and almond trees in partial blossom. Here, in my California, we fish out long noodles from the pho with such accuracy you’d think we’d done this before. In Fresno, the bullets tire of themselves and begin to pray five times a day. In […]

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