Read the titles first and enter Stone’s undiluted poetry with eyes wide open. Significance lies in the poet’s voice and imbalance of power in “You Ungrateful Girl”; in the descriptive tone and revealed irony in “Wrong Side Out”; and in the dare to unbury a rotting corpse like a metaphor of “rages” and “barbed words.”
In “The Dead Wall of Silence” the poet alludes to a partition against the backdrop of “sheep/and suckled cattle” in atypical dimeter and trimeter feet. In “Pieces,” he is not done with the fracturing: “Actual actions of schisms,” “splintered spectators,” “absolute absence”—just pieces. And in “Scratching Out Earth,” the poet faithfully renders the title in imagistic verse.
When you read a Hilles poem, you are inside a lyricism that doesn’t stop at the length of the poem but continues to move as if the poet has shown you how to be with love and life and soul, even if you have to eat sugar sandwiches. Read these poems and you will see.
Reger’s poetry wraps you in narratives of love and pain, sadness and longing. There is no escape from the sadness in the ballad “An Old Song.” Neither is there from the death of two lovers whispering lullabies on the banks of the Tigris in “The Incident.” Nor from the longing in the lyrical poem “Acceptable.”
Huang knows her way around personification—the transference of human feelings and attributes to abstract concepts—and she crafts the poems “Purpose” and “Love” using this figurative device. The poet switches to a witty-metered play on words in the onomatopoetic poem “Frozen Dream” —gifted with alliteration and assonance.
In the prose poem “To Pain,” the poet addresses her pain directly and forces it to the surface, giving it an immediate presence. Employing the same rhetorical device—the apostrophe— in “I hear you’ve settled in,” the poet addresses her absent lover, inviting the reader to listen too. “Bosom Story” is a narrative and as reachable.
The poet’s voice in “Money Buys Your Freedom” and “Visible to the Eye” is direct, audacious, empowered. No beating around the bush; the poet points out that money can buy the law and a woman can become someone’s “wind-up doll.” Not so in “Searchlight.” The poet is an “Electra of sorts” and open to “accepting any substitution.”
Poetry can be abstract or concrete, but there is nothing abstract about Hoffman’s poetry. How about surgical intervention as poetic inspiration? Or, the sound of a motorcycle in the dark as a rude awakening? Or “Three Fates at Night” by the side of the car window one midnight . . . and the poet shudders.
As different in mood and voice as they are in thought and theme, these poems reveal the poet’s structural versatility, whether it is explicit narrative in “My Seventh Christmas”; poetic ambiguity in “The Wind Gibbers With Their Voices”; or jazzed- up meter in “Jaco Pastorius,” in honor of the great bass player.
In this cemetery down the road from Inverness in Scotland, David McVey meditates on the dead in Tomnahurich poems: minor gentry, Indian Army subalterns, Anne MacKenzie, and others whose stories are untold, forgotten, lost.
Kay Bell’s Bronx Poems wrestle with hurt and loneliness, anger and love as only poetry can do to reach the inner core of empathy and understanding. Her poem “We are Loners (for my brother)” touches at the heart of love.
You know the voice of the poet is strong when you feel like you and she are in the same room; such is the case with Shelby Curran’s narrative poem “Farmhouse.”
Mary Leoson describes the relationship between the poet and her “Nana” in a pontoum, a poetic form in which content and form intertwine. See also “Shaman’s Dream,” a prose poem.
When you read Lynn Lipinski’s poetry, you sense the command she brings to her poetry, especially in the poetic line. She does not miss an elegiac beat in “Elegy” to her father.
In Brandon Marlon’s poetry a “gnawing angst” permeates his poems about existence. There is not a poem richer than “On the Wings of the Wind” to explore these “depths unfathomed.”
The poet blends narration and metaphor in a morality tale when the roads were supposedly safe but not for “Renee” who was raped by a driver in the woods. The Revolution didn’t happen and they “fled to the suburbs.”
Jacquelyn L.M. Scott bears witness to a woman’s experience being treated for cancer. There is no place to hide from these poems.
Just when you catch the linear threads in Chelsey van der Munnik’s poems— “January, “The Only,” “Told Me”—they shift and pull you in and in.
Takáts Márk retells the myth of Icarus in the poem “The Stars and Icarus,” with an ingenious twist that can’t help but make you laugh at the irony. And in the companion poem “Out of Order”? Oh, the hubris of the poet’s ego.
The pathos in Sarai Seekamp’s trilogy of poems “I Can’t Find My Brother” is apparent on first reading, but read them over and over and you might find yourself weeping.
Jordan Lindsey has a passion for poetic expression, which becomes clear as he blends form and content in one meaningful whole. See: “Swim in the Light.”
Sergio A. Ortiz paints his poetry with recurring images of birds and old trees and abstractions like desperation and desire, or “The roof” to cure loneliness where the poet “loved a man while dancing.”
In the poem “Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge” by Elizabeth Elliott, the driver depends on the cables that hold up the bridge suspended “like belief in a higher power,” but fear of the big earthquake lingers. What then?
I went today to the High Place
The vision place,
The seeing place,
I went up today to our place, high up in the hills.
I’d stayed away for oh so long
For so long,
Not knowing why,
I’d stayed away for so long, down where the mortals dwell.