Book Reviews

“A Field of Flowers Called Paintbrushes:”  A Review of Jericho Brown’s The Tradition

Tradition The Tradition, Jericho Brown’s first book of poetry since his award winning The New Testament was released in 2014, is nothing short of a transcendent collection. Part ethnography and part odyssey, it explores in three sections, themes of masculinity, sexuality, and race utilizing “tradition;” here a refreshingly multifaceted conceit as a method of delivery. […]

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Squirting Sriracha onto Everything: A Review of Michael Earl Craig’s “Woods and Clouds Interchangeable”

Early in Michael Earl Craig’s Woods and Clouds Interchangeable, forthcoming from Wave Books, there’s a poem that I would argue serves as key to reading the book—and Craig’s work overall. Specifically, it is the first stanza of “The Rabbit,” the collection’s third poem: I remember the spring when the rabbit with no ears showed up.

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Preservation and Perseverance: A Review of Emily Jungmin Yoon’s A Cruelty Special to Our Species

A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily Jungmin Yoon is a tender and sharp collection that navigates the history of “comfort women” used by the Japanese Empire during World War II. By bringing these events to the forefront of our minds and conversations, these powerful poems insist on the importance of the past. Yoon

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Knowing Silence Moves us to Speak: Review of Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic

“In these avenues, deafness is our only barricade,” reads the final line of “Checkpoints,” a poem in Ilya Kaminsky’s forthcoming book Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019). In a lyric world uniquely his own, deafness and its sister sound, silence, become the central tropes of Kaminsky’s book-length sequence of poems about war, resistance, death, and love. His

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Palestine in Queer Time: A Review of George Abraham’s The Specimen’s Apology

George Abraham’s new chapbook The Specimen’s Apology (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019) accomplishes the painfully vital and often deeply violent work of imagining. In claiming two identities made systematically invisible (Palestinian, and queer), Abraham weaves us into worlds from which we are desperate to escape. Much like Elizabeth in the referenced video game Bioshock: Infinite, the Palestinian/queer

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Sickness Bears Honesty; Honesty Bears Change: Thirty-Seven by Peter Stenson

Change is something that many of us strive for—changing ourselves, changing others, and, most particularly, changing the world. But too often we expect radical change without having to put in the work to achieve it; we ignore the arduous tasks that precede major transformation and just continue yearning, searching. Enter Mason Hues, the protagonist of

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red and blue watercolor

Wreath for a Bridal

Anne Stevenson’s review of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters appeared in MQR’s Winter 1999 issue. Our dear friend and longtime former Editor Lawrence Goldstein knows the journal’s publishing history like an intimate library, and he reminded us of this treasure from the archives.  In the United Kingdom, Ted Hughes is recognized as an outstanding—even the definitive—English

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Condition Of Secrecy by Inger Christensen front cover

The Word Wholly Itself: Inger Christensen’s “The Condition of Secrecy”

At the risk of generalizing perhaps too broadly, prose by poets—that is, prose written by writers whose primary mode is poetry—seems to fall into two camps. Either the writing is extremely sober, to clearly differentiate it from the poet’s poetry (think criticism, or op-eds), or poets’ prose reads like poetry. Which is to say it

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artwork of a circle with red triangles and squares on the sides and one black square inside a bigger grey one in the center

Complicating the Canon: A Review of “The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, Vol. IV”

If Irish poetry could not claim to be fine art before the twentieth century, it is not because there was a lack of Irish poets with talent and voice; rather, it is because the literary world ignored them, or willfully caricaturized them. Though the problem persists, this anthology makes it clear: the work of Irish poets is undeniably diverse, crafted with rigor, and historically urgent.

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