Poetry December 2023 is a collection of poems and a feature of Frank Marshall Davis. It’s a solid issue with Diane Seuss with ‘Cowpunk’, Okwudili Nebeolisa with ‘Innocence’, and Frank Michell Davis with ‘Giles Johnson, Ph.D.’. I especially enjoyed the interview, discussion, and short essay by Davis’s daughter. It was an in-depth look on how Davis’s work was heavily influenced by living in Chicago, the way people at the time saw his work as too political and bordering on propaganda, and how he viewed his work.
Final Rating: 3.5/5
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A Hundred Lovers by Richie Hofmann is a collection of poems focusing on the erotic, gay, and tender moments the speaker remembers with his past lovers. I particularly enjoyed ‘One Another’, with its lines, “How easily the earth closes / its cavities.” I also enjoyed ‘Spring Wedding’, ‘Mummified Bird’, ‘Opulence’, and ‘French Novel’. ‘Spring Wedding’ fractures its stanzas between the erotic (the first half) and the mundane with “We will have children. / We will buy another house.” The imagery is stark and the collection isn’t afraid to take on themes of sexuality with precision.
Final Rating: 4.5/5 Sky Ladders by Ethan Chua is a chapbook centering on the Chinese-Filipino experience and the effect of the Atlanta shooting that killed Asian Americans. The poems feel raw, at times in their untranslated forms, and in their translated forms. I found the poem, ‘The Bardo’, with its last few lines to be striking, “(48) how she always picked up when I called, and that day she did / (49) & the sound was forever”. I also found the poem, ‘Arrivals’, with its initial lines to be intense and powerful.
Final Rating: 4/5 The Kenyon Review Summer 2023 is a collection of poetry, short stories, and essays focusing on Women’s Health and ecopoetics. I was particularly drawn to the essay, ‘Shelter in Place’, by Sydney Tammarine, the essay, ‘How to Tell a True Love Story’, by Leslie Jill Patterson, the story, ‘Robber’s Lake’, by Emma Binder, the story, ‘Burnings’, by Kabi Hartman, and the poem, ‘Comfort Food’, by Terrance Hayes. In ‘Robber’s Lake’, a boy fashions himself a diving rig to go to the bottom of a lake and bring back his mother’s painting which he thinks will bring her out of her depression. He enlists the help of an older gay man and as the boy searches, his contraption fills with water and the man has to jump in to save him. This collection was strong in its discussion of the environment and how women are vital for a healthy world.
Final Rating: 4/5 The Greensboro Review Fall 2023 is a collection of poetry and fiction with a few notable stories. The first is ‘Expedition’ by Mike Nees, which is about a man who is determined to go on an expedition to the poles to prove that the earth is hollow. The narrative slowly shows how unhinged the man, Justin, is in his adoption of other fanciful conspiracy theories. Another story I enjoyed was ‘Goblin’ by Robert Stone with its eeriness and reference to an imaginary goblin between a father and son. It had some striking images with the decomposed food behind the oven being one of them. The final story I enjoyed was ‘Men with Guns’ by Ania Mroczek for how oddly the speaker has a fixation on guns and the men who own them. Later on, it’s revealed she has a fascination because of her parent dying in a car crash with guns in the glove compartment. Overall, I enjoyed the way the stories flowed and thought it was an interesting issue.
Final Rating: 4/5 In this issue, the month I was born, there were a few poems I enjoyed reading. Namely, ‘One Possible Meaning’, by Charlie Smith with the final lines, “The park is dusty, dark, yet the children, / ignored all day, play on, convinced their dedication / releases a magic that changes everything.” Another poem I enjoyed was, ‘Veterans’, by Mark Wisniewski. Though, I was a little taken aback at John Brehm’s, ‘At the Poetry Reading’, which accounts a night where the speaker goes to a reading, but isn’t interested in the poems, but rather the wife of the poet. It is hauntingly misogynistic, which makes the speaker somewhat of a distasteful voice. If this was what Brehm was trying to go for, he hit the mark with the lines, “I’m imagining / myself slide up his wife’s fluid”. The poem itself seems self-indulgent with the final lines referring to the speaker as a better poet than the subject of the poem, “once she leaves him, / leaves him for another poet, perhaps, / the observant, uninnocent one, who knows / a poem when it sits down in a room with him.” All in all, there were some hits and misses in this issue.
Final Rating: 3/5 In the 1970 March issue of Poetry, there were a few poems I enjoyed. ‘The White Hotel’ by Richard Shelton has the lines, “that memory is the only / kind of loss we ever know”, which I thought was a strong way to end the poem. The only other poem that I found held me was ‘On Earth’ by Michael Benedikt which has an interesting indentation. However, on the whole I found it a little lackluster. Some of the commentary was interesting, but didn’t bring the pizzaz I associate with late 60’s / early 70’s type poetry.
Final Rating: 3/5 Warda by Nardine Taleb is a poetry chapbook about being Arab American, Taleb’s relationship with God, and the Egyptian culture she grew up in. This collection, and specifically the poem ‘body of a whale’ confronts these identities head on with the lines, “It is hard/to see the world without america in my body.” There is tenderness, love, longing, and a need to understand everything in a world that contradicts itself.
Final Rating: 4/5 The Kenyon Review Spring 2023 is a collection of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translations which heavily focused on translations edited by Jennifer Croft, Jeremy Tiang, and Anton Hur. Overall, I thought it was a decent issue, and there were some wacky stories, such as ‘Tumbleweed’ by Ao Omae and translated by Emily Balistrieri which follows the life of a movie star tumbleweed who had once been a person. Another strange story was ‘The Aspiration for Cha-Ka-Ta-Pa’ by Bae Myung-Hoon and translated by Sung Ryu which is about a futuristic time where people go to a library to be immersed in life of the 2020’s and the language/spelling is not like I’ve seen before. There were two stories that I enjoyed which were ‘A Field Guide to the Bear-Men of Leningrad’ by Sam J. Miller and ‘Two-Headed Dog’ by J. T. Sutlive. The first story features a town in which people fear bear-men who come in at night and eat the villagers, but it turns out that the speaker realizes they’re one of the bear-men. And the second story is about two men, one American who teaches English, the other a Japanese man who works construction/clean-up after a tsunami. The two men are gay and grow close and have an on/off relationship. And I enjoyed the subtlety of the emotions between the two when one of them grieves the loss of his brother in the tsunami. Overall, I enjoyed the short stories, albeit they were a little weird, but didn’t connect too much with the poetry.
Final Rating: 3/5 Dryland Issue 11 is a collection of poetry, short fiction, nonfiction, and interviews focusing on the people and experiences of South Central LA. There were a few poems that I enjoyed, particularly, ‘We’re Still Too Close to Mexico, Still so Far from God’ by Antonia Silva, ‘Watching the Sunrise from the Second Story’ by Angel Cerritos, ‘A Car Crash is not a Poem’ by Lupita Limón Corrales, ‘Amá Teaches Me How to Whistle’ by Moncho Alvarado, and ‘Newlywed in a Pandemic’ by Samantha Rivas. I also enjoyed the nonfiction piece, ‘My Dad Who Bakes Bread’ by Cecilia Caballero because of how it ties their family history to food and how that changes and alters how they see the world. I enjoyed the issue overall, though found the short fiction to—at times—be a little too simplistic. (Note: Dryland was renamed to sin cesar after this issue.)
Final Rating: 3/5 |
AuthorMaxwell Suzuki is a writer, poet, and photographer based in Los Angeles. Archives
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