Iron Horse Literary Review 26.1 is a collection of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and interviews. The story I enjoyed the most in this issue was ‘All B’s and One C’ by Patrick Font which details the life of a flunking student trying to get by in summer school. He takes weed from his father’s stash and sells it to his classmates. I liked how the voice of Joey comes through, the way he views María, and the lengths he will go to cover for himself.
Final Rating: 3/5
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South Dakota Review 58.1 is a collection of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Out of the pieces, I enjoyed ‘Nepenthes Northiana’ by Virgil Suárez, ‘When it Rains’ by Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Never Break Two Laws at Once’ by Adam Straus, and ‘Mascot Worship’ by William Musgrove. Particularly the story by Adam Straus was interesting in the way it handled desertion, anxiety, and dislike toward the military.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 Instructions between Takeoff and Landing by Charles Jensen is a collection of poems that delve into the loss of a mother and contemplations on queerness. The poems are broken up into sections, with the ones under the ‘Story Problems’ sections adapting essay questions/discussions. I was fond of the poems discussing space and the Voyager satellite, ‘The Space Race’, ‘Instructions between Takeoff and Landing’, and ‘The Space Race, Cont.’. I also liked the poems ‘Hospice’ for its form and how it handled its subject matter and ‘Mortality’ for how strongly it worked the speaker’s life into the piece. The collection talks to itself, sometimes questions itself, and in that reflection, it creates intensity in its layers.
Final Rating: 4/5 When Your Sky Runs Into Mine by Rooja Mohassessy is a collection of poems describing the impacts and reverberations of the war in Iran, both as a child and in reflection. There are many moments of depth from ‘They Were Blind and Mad, Some of Them Were Laughing. There Was Nobody to Lead the Blind People.’ to ‘Interview for Asylum’. The collection exposes and ruminates on the loss of childhood, of friends and family, of hearing, and of joy. It’s a gut-wrenching but needed collection.
Final Rating: 4/5 Bad Mexican, Bad American by Jose Hernandez Diaz is a collection of prose surrealist poems that discuss the experiences of a Mexican American living in LA. There are poems about having a conversation on Jupiter, a man riding his bike on the ocean, a lizard man teaching a class, and so many more weird and entertaining situations. The poems I enjoyed the most were ‘Ballad of the West Coast Mexican American/Chicanx’, ‘Bad Mexican, Bad American’, ‘Insomniac Moon’, ‘The Stranger’, and ‘Bones’. And I really enjoyed the line, “I put ketchup in my breakfast burrito;” which encapsulates the two cultures meshing into one. It’s a fun and surprising read.
Final Rating: 4/5 Rupture by Adrie Rose is a poetry chapbook focusing on the experience and time after of having an ectopic pregnancy. I particularly enjoyed the poems, ‘Rupture’, and ‘The Bell’. The poems also experiment with form through erasure and spacing.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara provides a strikingly deep look at Frank O’Hara’s work and his life. Most of the poems provide an almost diary-like feel to them which creates an intimate view of O’Hara’s thoughts. It seems he was consciously trying to push back on the conventional idea of what poetry was at the time, as can be seen through the continual iteration of titling many of his poems ‘Poem’. There is a wide breadth of poems that I enjoyed, though found ‘Poem [Let’s take a walk, you]’, ‘1951’, ‘Steven’, ‘Lebanon’, ‘Poem [Pawing the mound with his hairy legs]’, ‘Two Dreams of Waking’, ‘The Anthology of Lonely Days’, ‘Three Poems’, and ‘Rogers in Italy’ all to be particularly interesting. And I really enjoyed the lines in ‘Rogers in Italy’ that goes, “And now at last I am/alone again and night, at last, has come.” Throughout the poems, there are thoughts about paintings, other poets, his mood, and his sexual encounters both with men and women. Also, the essay, ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ was interesting.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 Pop Culture Poetry: The Definitive Collection by Michael B. Tager is a collection of poems contemplating the nostalgia, cultural effects, and personal connections to important people such as Justin Bieber to Patrick Swayze. I enjoyed the poems, ‘All Neon Like’, ‘Justin Bieber, as Dalmatian’, ‘Justin Bieber, as Capitalism’, ‘Genghis Sees a Michael Bay Movie’, and ‘Human fighter jet’. The poems are playful, humorous, and provide interesting scenarios.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 Temporal Anomalies by Matt Broaddus is a collection of poems split into three parts tackling the past, present, and future. It approaches the experience of being black, as well as providing a surrealist approach to its final section. I particularly enjoyed the poems, ‘Lalibela’, ‘Aboretum’, and the whole final section, ‘Space Station’.
Final Rating: 4/5 Love Poems by Anne Sexton is a collection of poems centered on the subjects of desire, love, pain, and departure. The majority of the poems work to provide a context of the desire for the final poem, ‘Eighteen Days Without You’. The poems provide imagery with lines such as, “The small animals of the woods/are carrying their deathmasks/into a narrow winter cave.” from ‘It is a Spring Afternoon’ to “I have walked through a door in my dreams/and she was standing there in my mother’s apron.” in ‘The Interrogation of the Man of Many Hearts’. Other poems I found powerful were ‘In Celebration of my Uterus’, ‘The Nude Swim’, ‘Us’, and ‘December 9th’ of ‘Eighteen Days Without You’. There’s an intensity these poems possess in their frankness with sex or in the way desire leaks out in the final poem.
Final Rating: 4/5 |
AuthorMaxwell Suzuki is a writer, poet, and photographer based in Los Angeles. Archives
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