Tag: review
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microreview & interview: The Book of Mirrors by Yun Wang
review by José Angel Araguz Reading through The Book of Mirrors (Winner of the Twenty-Sixth White Pine Press Poetry Prize, 2021) by Yun Wang, I find myself marveling again and again at her facility with the poetic image. Across poems ranging in theme from feminism, dreams, literary figures, motherhood, and the universe, Wang’s use of…
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new review at The Bind!
Front-note: I hope everyone is staying safe out there–whether you’re protesting in person or doing activism at home. Black Lives Matter and we must do everything to push against systemic oppression. * Also, just a quick post to share that my chronicle-review of Rosa Alcalá’s MyOTHER TONGUE (Futurepoem) went live earlier this week at The Bind! Read…
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microreview & interview: Real Daughter by Lynn Otto
review by José Angel Araguz It seems simple to say that what words can point to and hold is a constant source of meditation for me and other poets. Yet, this type of meditation is a high stakes one as it is in contemplating what words can hold that one also necessarily reckons with what…
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one more from Susan Lewis
In my recent microreview & interview of Zoom (The Word Works, 2018) by Susan Lewis, I discussed Lewis’ deftness with the prose poem as working through a push-pull between familiarity and distinction. The traditional structures of sentence and paragraph are subverted in the poems of Zoom with non-traditional phrasing and concepts. In the case of “In Praise of…
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one more from Sarah McCartt-Jackson
In my recent microreview & interview of Stonelight (Airlie Press) by Sarah McCartt-Jackson, I noted how nature is often used as a lens in these poems to engage with human understanding and feeling. In detailing the narrative of Ora and her family, this lens feels natural, a kind of environmental intuition. Much like in poetry writing, the speakers…
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microreview & interview: Stonelight by Sarah McCartt-Jackson
review by José Angel Araguz In Stonelight, winner of the 2017 Airlie Prize, Sarah McCartt-Jackson adds to the tradition of lyric narrative collections that includes Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie and Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, books that take on the materials of human life and through them evoke human presence. Informed by McCartt-Jackson’s background in folk…
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microreview & interview: Love Me, Anyway by Minadora Macheret
review by José Angel Araguz The First Time PCOS Spoke – Minadora Macheret The doctor didn’t believe my periods had disappeared. Most months were painless as I watched all the other girls clutch cramps and bloating— I wanted that too. I was different enough and every 28 days I begged my uterus. Medicine wrestles pubescent…
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one more from José Olivarez
In my recent microreview & interview of José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal (Haymarket Books), I noted some of the ways the collection interrogates the multiple dualities of the Latinx, specifically Mexican-American, experience. Through word play and rhetorical moves, Olivarez uses his gift of speaking about narratives that often get neglected to present the nuances of language as well…
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microreview & interview: Citizen Illegal by José Olivarez
review by José Angel Araguz The Latinx experience is often reduced to ideas of duality. There’s the phrase “ni de aqui, ni de allá” (neither from here nor from there). There’s Gustavo Peréz Firmat’s idea of “living on the hyphen,” which acknowledges the duality of having a hyphpenated identity, in his case Cuban-American. Even one…
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new review at The Bind!
Just a quick post to share my latest review for The Bind! In this review, I share thoughts on Lara Mimosa Montes’s The Somnambulist (Horse Less Press, 2016) via an “eight-ball” form. Alternating between excerpts from the book and my own critical/meditative prose reflections, this review mimics the pool game of eight-ball in terms of its section and…