Xavier’s spectral invocations derive no small power from an eye for simultaneity: between past and present, life and death, and for events separated only by geographical distance… read more

“The past is a foreign country,” wrote novelist L. P. Hartley in 1953’s The Go-Between. “They do things differently there.” This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press), the debut collection from Lambda Literary Award finalist Michael Broder, foregrounds its narrator as the go-between for his current and past selves, to American decades where things were… read more

Dooley has a particular heartbreaking family story to relate, of children abused, of the traumatized adults who find themselves in closets both metaphorical and literal… read more

“In Emmaus’ obsessively catalogued auction house, human figures are dwarfed by time and failure, and yet rendered oddly, touchingly precious…”… read more

Nefarious is a testament whose utterance often feels less printed than voiced by a cool gust pushing newspapers along the city’s now-gentrified streets and renovated piers, where hustlers and other outcasts of society once made defiant gestures of survival…. read more

Metaphysical Dog is a grandly, at times depressingly valedictory collection…… read more

It’s far too easy to see an elision of religion and sacrilege in the title of L. Lamar Wilson’s bombshell of a collection, Sacrilegion (Carolina Wren Press), and thereby overlook the third member of a trinity: legion…. read more

The distinctive poetic vision creates its own climate to which a reader, going from tourist to townie, can happily adapt. By the time readers of Skin Shift (Sibling Rivalry Press) encounter a deer-crossing sign with anatomy defaced in black magic marker, in the penultimate section’s “Sitting in a WaWa Parking Lot,” they are attuned to the phrase’s… read more

This April, magazines and blogs across the web have been running poem specials to celebrate National Poetry Month. With only a couple days left, I thought I’d take stock and share some of my favorites so far:… read more