Category: microreviews & interviews
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microreview & interview: Rodney Gómez’s Citizens of the Mausoleum
review by José Angel Araguz What a poet lists in their poems says much about what is important to them. There is a gesture of trying to catalog and hold onto, but also one of presenting and (re)presenting. Listing is a move I often find myself drawn to and examining in reading contemporary poems because…
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microreview & interview – it’s the soul that’s erotic: an essay on adélia prado
review by José Angel Araguz Early in his essay-turned-chapbook it’s the soul that’s erotic: an essay on adélia prado (Orison Books), poet Ilya Kaminsky speaks of Adélia Prado’s work as being in the mystic tradition. He then promptly delves into the questions and assumptions that come along with references to mysticism. Noting that “the term mystic…
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microreview & interview: Hannah Cohen’s Bad Anatomy
-review by José Angel Araguz There’s a sense of recklessness that feels natural to poetry. By recklessness, I mean less Robin Williams standing on a desk shouting a Whitman poem in Dead Poets Society and more the honesty and nerve involved in trusting language to carry what you mean. It is this latter recklessness that runs…
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microreview & interview: Griselda J Castillo’s Blood & Piloncillo
review by José Angel Araguz Often I find myself discussing poetry as awkward human utterance, that what we are after as poets is being able to say things in a way only we can say them. In Griselda J Castillo’s chapbook, Blood & Piloncillo (Poxo Publication), this work is done distinctly at the level of word choice…
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microreview & interview: Emily Corwin’s tenderling
review by José Angel Araguz Looking up definitions of the title phrase to Emily Corwin’s tenderling (Stalking Horse Press, 2018), I found three meanings: one definition refers to one who has been coddled, or one who is weak or effeminate; the second has the word “tenderling” refer to a little child; and the last to one of the budding antlers of a…
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microreview & interview: Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Malak
review by José Angel Araguz Autobiography at Fifty Feet – Jenny Sadre-Orafai We’ll write our autobiography when we’re teenagers, before we grow into our teeth. Before we meet people who will laugh at us for reasons we’ll talk about when we’re older and divorced. And we’ll both still know our exes because we have to,…
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microreview & intervew: Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory [lukao]
review by José Angel Araguz from the legends of juan malo (a malologue) ~ (the birth of Guåhan) “Guam” is now named “Guåhan,” which translates as [we] have. As in [we] have deep water and the U.S. expects [us] to home port 60% of the Pacific fleet. Or [we] have to continue supporting the Navy…
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microreview & interview: Kelly Davio’s It’s Just Nerves
review by José Angel Araguz Kelly Davio’s It’s Just Nerves: notes on a disability (Squares & Rebels, 2017) is a collection of creative nonfiction essays that explore and report the inner and outer realities of living with myasthenia gravis, a “a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease that causes weakness in the skeletal muscles, which are responsible for breathing…
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microreview & interview: Jennifer Met’s Gallery Withheld
review by José Angel Araguz At the end of “Coming of Age in Idaho,” the second poem in Jennifer Met’s chapbook Gallery Withheld (Glass Poetry Press, 2017), the reader is presented with the phrase “an immovable feast” which hearkens back to Ernest Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast. This reference is key on a number of levels beyond wordplay.…
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microreview & interview: Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s Scar On/Scar Off
review by José Angel Araguz Loriella is Dead – Jennifer Maritza McCauley Yesterday Loriella choke-cried into my phone, saying we black gals got to stick together, hip to hip since the world is a leech sucking at our night necks, and I said girlIhearyou and I could hear her voice cleaving clean down the center…
The Friday Influence 