Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category

Mere weeks into the new year, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, set to be released by BOA this September, is already being called a 2012 must-read by reviewer Craig Morgan Teicher from NPR Books. In a composite review of 8 highly recommended poetry collections for 2012, Teicher puts Clifton’s at the top of the list. He praises her work by suggesting to readers that – should they only read one poetry book in 2012 – Clifton’s new collection “ought to be it.”

As excitement builds for the release of this monumental book, which contains all of Clifton’s published (and a number of unpublished) poems, readers and reviewers will likely ruminate on the qualities which make her poetry so captivating and abiding, even after her passing.

This is a big year for Clifton’s readers – let the anticipation begin!

Click here to read Teicher’s review [Not Your Parents' Poems: A 2012 Poetry Review]

Michael Waters' Gospel Night

Matthew Guenette of the Southern Indiana Review’s “First Takes with Matthew Guenette” asks himself “What is in the work of a title?” After reading Waters’ tenth collection of poems, Guenette finds the poet’s ability to provoke tension from diction something worth turning over and over again while considering both words of the title. The “work of this title,” as Guenette writes, conclusively demonstrates the mastery of word choice and form to be found in each poem of the collection.

Guenette sees the four sections of Gospel Night as individual guides for understanding Waters’ overall explanations of worldly and warring violence, his tonal move into the mind of the young artist in the poems of part III, and the wise and up to date persona he uses uses in Section IV.

Guenette reads Gospel Night as a book of self-reflexive pieces where the poet is fascinated by form, making poems that exist for themselves. And finally thinking over the reason for making such independently existing poems, Guenette sees the idea of order in the collection as one that comes from a poet on his tenth book with still many more miles to go.

Gospel Night can be found here in the BOA store.

University of Southern Indiana– First Takes with Matthew Guenette

Adam McOmber admits he’s been an ardent fan of the macabre and horror genre since high school. His own writing reflects the exquisitely unhiemlich, “the fantastic moments when the strange breaks through our daily grind.” In a recent interview with the New School’s LIT writer Mike Gillis, McOmber talks about his passion for the mythology and the fiction like his This New and Poisonous Air and the upcoming Empyrean.

“I think that these type of stories- stories of the fantastic- reach back to mythology. Because that’s what myths are,” he said in a phone interview. “I think humans in general are drawn to these stories because they create this rupture in daily, general experience, and humans in general want that. So I think there’s a staying power in that type of fiction.” McOmber himself tends to stay away from the genre convention and tropes popular in most horror genre pieces, saying, “You don’t want to write something that is purple in a gothic way, because that’s really grating. … When I write I look for a certain kind of density. I avoid those kind of stereotypically gothic things. If I ever write and image that feels like that I’ll try to flip it or figure out another way to present it.”

Asked about the recurring images of simulacra in his work, such as the automatons in the opening story, “The Automatic Garden,”  or the wax figures of Madame Tussad’s museum in “There Are No Bodies Such as These,” McOmber admits laughingly that “Yes, my work is kind of like these little machines. … It’s like the Automatic Garden itself. It’s something I can lose myself in.”

So can we, Adam, so can we.

This New and Poisonous Air is available for purchase here.

You can read the whole review over at Newcity Lit, here.

Aracelis Girmay, BOA poet

Kingdom Animalia, a collection of poetry by Aracelis Girmay, was chosen as the August selection for The Rumpus Poetry Book Club.  Camille T. Dungy reviewed Girmay’s collection explaining why Kingdom Animalia is an excellent choice for this month’s book.

Dungy found Kingdom Animalia to be an invigorating work that “maps the world in which we live, classifying us, grouping us, reminding us of what sets us apart, and what ties us together.”  The collection itself succeeds in demonstrating, examining, and revealing relationships.  The relationships that Girmay address range from people to animals, seasons to sounds, and species to elements.  In order to accomplish this dimensional and intricate theme, Girmay “employs the ancient tool of identifying the sacred in the mundane.”  Additionally, Girmay is not afraid to address distance within relationships because of “illness, shame, mobility, the passing of seasons, or death” but notes that “none of them are large enough breaches to void connection.”

One of the most striking and beautifully creative aspects of Girmay’s work is that she forces multiple languages to complement her work.  Rather than being a barrier, Girmay’s use of language takes on the challenge of demonstrating relationships by communicating common understanding and evoking new perspectives.  In this way, Girmay’s “poems broaden the stories, widening our perspectives” by creating an “expansive and inclusive voice and vision.”  The reader gains a sense of intimacy with a work that is “both personal and communal.”

To read the full review, follow the link here.

WBEZ 91.5 featured a review of Adam McOmber’s short story collection, This New & Poisonous Air.  The review speaks highly of McOmber’s work and his ability to blend “myths, fairy tales, and fables” into beautiful and intriguing stories.  McOmber uses a varied palette of time and history to create fresh and innovative characters, events, and pictures.

These “intricate and provocative stories” are at once distinct and yet unified in their “timeless” quality.  McOmber has succeeded in creating a collection that is “laced with sorrow and mystery, beauty and compassion, insight and protest.”  Further, “This New & Poisonous Air is exquisitely crafted, daringly inventive and keenly haunting.”

To read the full review follow the link here.

Two of BOA’s recent stars, Nikola Madzirov and the inimitable team of John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep, were recently featured in the Bloomsbury Review, a bimonthly “book magazine” devoted to sharing the best contemporary literature. “Our mission,” they write, “is to seek out those quality books that are underserved and undeservedly overlooked by other media—bringing you reviews of books from large publishers that don’t receive the promotional budget of their bestsellers, and new books from small, regional, nonprofit, independent, and university presses you won’t discover elsewhere.”

Besides this, the Bloomsbury Review is “simply lively writing about good reading and great writers,” and it is in this way that both Waldrep and Gallaher’s Your Father on the Train of Ghosts and Madzirov’s Remnants of Another Age fit quite neatly into their publication. Of Remnants, Bloomsbury’s reviewer writes, “[t]his first book of his work in English is a beautiful and moving collection by a young master of the short poem. A surreal, multidimensional tone… carries them beyond history, war, or cultural fragmentation. … His poems reach out to galaxies, rooftops, and ‘womb[s] of the earth,’ and examine what is and what might be, if the maker of language wishes it.”

Of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, the “odd and fascinating” collaboration between G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher, the reviewer writes, “After reading this book a few times and coming up for air, it is clear to the reader that G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher have written an important book in the continuing exploration of the poetic moment of exhilaration and breathless reaffirmation.”

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is available for purchase here.
Remnants of Another Age is available for purchase here.

In a recent review of G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher’s Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, blogger C. Moniz at California Poetics highlights the glittering electricity of their words, finding that “[t]he lines could stand on their own without the reader having to know a single detail about ‘the performance,’ which could be any number of life’s glittering spectacles.” Moniz references the poem “A Short History of Friendship,” saying, “The power of these lines is intensified by the dismissive tone of ‘just’ and ‘anyway.’ … The downplay of these phenomena—a luminescent insect, a celestial body, a shard of geologic history in a modern roadway—works to intensify their extraordinary nature and their unlikeliness.” One might even go as far as to notice the poem’s hints at the extraordinary nature of Waldrep and Gallaher’s own friendship, from the midst of which comes this new and indeed, luminescent collaboration.

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is available for purchase here.

Read the full review here.

G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher’s collection Your Father on the Train of Ghosts has been hailed before as the seamless product of a collaboration which, rather than producing a host of call-and-response or exquisite corpse poems, comes through with a third, somewhat different voice than either poet alone. In Newcity Lit’s recent review of the book (and it’s hard to call it just a book), however, the interlacing of American Life as subject matter with this new voice is also examined. Tackling “an undeniably complicated, expansive subject,” Waldrep and Gallaher’s poems “slip fluidly from topic to topic, from the interior of a house (’… and what do we have to show for it / around the dinner table, or the sound like a dinner table’), to the exterior: parkways and botanical gardens, chapels and hospitals.”

It is this third poetic voice, produced by a year of back-and-forth emails between Waldrep and Gallaher, which illuminates the landscape of the poems. “It is this voice, among the mass of American voices it represents, that was most consistent and illuminating. … With a sturdy assurance, this voices explores the commonalities we find within our shared physical spaces and places, the imprints left on the objects we interact with on a daily basis. In a web of doors, windows, phones and groceries, Gallaher and Waldrep allow us to see how we can leave impressions on our tangible environments that rival the emotion effects we can leave on family members and lovers after we pass on.”

“By bringing the inanimate to life,” the review continues, “there is a revival of the mundane.” And what else could be more poetic?

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is available for purchase here.

Read the full review at Newcity Lit here.

G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher received praise for their collection of poetry, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts.  Boston Review notes that this poetry calls in a unique perspective of collective voice between the two authors.  The poetry is seamlessly assembled into poems with “real strength.”

Waldrep and Gallaher’s poetry is a pleasing “example of contemporary work” that seeks to “express the exhaustion of excess.”  Not one poem is wasted in contributing to the collection.  Each poem dives into the communion of speakers and souls as they share awareness and become a whole new creative voice together.

Together, Waldrep and Gallaher “create a closed conversational loop” but one that simultaneously creates an “effect…of welcome.”

Cecilia Woloch’s poem “My Mother’s Pillow,” from her book Late, was recently selected as the weekly poem in American Life in Poetry, a “project for newspapers” run by 2004-2006 US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. “I don’t often mention literary forms,” Kooser writes in his brief introduction to Woloch’s work, “but of this lovely poem… I want to suggest that the form, a villanelle, which uses a pattern of repetition, adds to the enchantment I feel in reading it. it has a kind of layering, like memory itself.”

Read “My Mother’s Pillow” on American Life in Poetry here.

Like what you read? You can purchase Cecilia Woloch’s Late here.