Catherine Strisik’s Thousand-Cricket Song is a ceremony. The speaker is supplicant– Please say each skull has a voice, at the same time that she is a brief witness to– a nation of 12 million traumatized people, the survivors and the children of survivors of the Khmer Rouge’s mass killings. Often Strisik’s voice is oracular, though looking not so much forward or backward, but into. It is at other times the voice of an erotically and creatively awake...

Robert Wrigley’s newest book is entitled, Beautiful Country. (It is Wrigley’s eighth book of poems.) The title is drawn from a quote from John Brown, the American insurrectionist. In Brown’s reference to “country,” perhaps he was talking about the countryside of Charlestown, Virginia; perhaps he was talking on a larger scale about the sprawling national identity of the United States, itself. Wrigley, too, likes to work on a terrain that can shift from remote instinct ...

Bar Book, Julie Sheehan’s third title, is a concoction of poetry and prose. Sheehan centers the book around the voice of an American barmaid; and what unfolds is a narrative of lost comfort and security--both emotional and financial. Life does not always go as one planned...

The poems in Barbara Ras’s new book, The Last Skin are as fluid and graceful as those in her previous two collections: Bite Every Sorrow and One Hidden Stuff. The Last Skin is an extension of the metaphysics laid out in those first two books, and Ras’ poetic stance is that...

Karen Swenson’s newest title, A Pilgrim into Silence, is divided into four sections. Each of the sections explores the life journey of an urban American woman—a woman of a generation and a class perhaps tinged with theatrical qualities of pomp and circumstance; a lady propelled by notions of religion and reason...

Upon reading Landscape with Silos, Deborah Bogen’s first award winning book, one could recognize authentic, accomplished poetics. In her new book, Let Me Open You a Swan, Bogen again lays out a moving constellation. The girl who once kicked a can down the road now reconstructs a landscape and lays out the architecture of a mind. In increments, Bogen’s poetry moves from images of the superstitious augury of animal parts to images of the...

Birds of Hoboken was published in 1995. Not Till We Are Lost, William Wenthe’s second collection, was published in 2004. The two books, end to end, read as a testament to craft and seasoned poetic vision. Both books use birds as vehicles. Poetic flight has long fired somber divinations and lyric contemplations. In Birds of Hoboken the vehicles give way to soliloquies concerned with time and cause and effect on...

Philip Clark and David Groff have just joined forces and edited an anthology of poems by poets lost to AIDS. The collection is entitled Persistent Voices and has been published by Alyson Books. Some of the forty artists featured are Tory Dent, Melvin Dixon, Tim Dlugos, Jaime Gil de Biedma, Essex Hemphill, Leland Hickman, David Matias, Paul Schmidt, Karl Tierney, and Assotto Saint. The span of voices is smart and exhilarating...

Deeply personal and insightfully written, Patti Smith’s New York story delivers the emotional narrative that Bob Dylan’s Chronicles left readers wanting. Tracing the relationship between Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids explores the thriving artistic community of New York in the 60’s and 70’s and paints a portrait...

Suffering and poetic inspiration are complex traveling companions. Some poets rise out of inflicted harshness and physical deprivation. Inversely, physical comfort can deepen a writer’s sense of poetic urgency. We have proof of the latter in Patty Seyburn’s third title, Hilarity.