Book Reviews

Dopplegangbanger by Cortney Lamar Charleston Book Cover

The Polarities of a Black Boy: a review of Cortney Lamar Charleston’s Dopplegangbanger

According to his website, Cortney Lamar Charleston is a poet whose words “paint themselves against the backgrounds of past and present.” Identity, he says, is, “functionally, a transition zone” between “race, masculinity, class, family, and faith.” In his latest collection, Dopplegangbanger, there is a conflict of the soul.  The opening poem, “The Unauthorized Biography of …

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[Elegies] by Roberto Carlos Garcia Book Cover

Exhaust the Little Moment: A Review of Roberto Carlos Garcia’s [Elegies]

Roberto Carlos Garcia’s latest, [Elegies], is a collection to be kept close at hand right now, as every day sends us further into the upside-down of mask mandates and social distancing. In every possible sense, it is an essential bedside companion, be it a self-isolated hotel drawer or hospital room trapped in the shadows of …

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Insomnia 11 by Michael C. Keith Book Cover

The Wry Humor of Insomnia 11 by Michael C. Keith

It is the recursive logic of irony—the doubling back, the reconsideration of supposed facts, the coincidences and paradoxes of sound and sense—that explains the appropriateness of Keith’s choice of “insomnia” as a unifying scaffold for what otherwise might appear to be over one hundred disparate pieces.

Flourish by Dora Malech Book Cover

Wit and Wisdom: Dora Malech’s Balancing Act Flourish

Across the book, and across the many different types of poems within it, Malech uses her expert sense of metaphor, timing, and relationships among words to strike a sort of wry, sideways-glancing balance between celebrating happiness and recognizing pain.