“Like Oleander”, “Navigating Silence” and “Tiresias, the Seer (a poem in 9 Tankas)”
Effie PasagiannisRead Pasagiannis poems quietly, as they offer you an opening to the ethereal and spiritual and mysterious. Each poem breathes its own poetic nuance in form and content, but they gather the difference in “Navigating Silence”: “just listen.”
“The Bats in the Willow”, “Revenant Gloam” and “I Cannot Make Permanent Things”
Melissa MulvihillBats, the revenant gloam, and impermanence are the subjects of Mulvihill’s poetry here. Yes, their commonality may not be obvious, but Mulviill’s storytelling marks her poetry—personal and unequivocally forthright. Her voice is her truth.
“The Dedekind Cut”, “Triangles Reconstructed: Dad’s Last Hospitalization, Son Caught In The Middle” and “Laundromat 1, 2, 3…9”
Gerard SarnatEver heard of the “Dedekind Cut?” Sarnat explains the second part as the “partitioning of philosophical arguments,” and goes on to reveal an ironic vulnerability in “Triangles Reconstructed: Dad’s Last Hospitalization . . . .”
“Frankenstein, I love you”, “For Shilpa” and “Ash Wednesday”
Natalia ZverevaReading Zvereva’s poetry is like entering a lush garden of words that find meaning in their juxtaposition, and the senses dominate while reason takes a back seat, if only for a little while. Feeling pulls you toward the understanding and not knowing.
“The Millenials”, “he is no surprise” and “a Boxer’s beginning, at the end”
Komal KeshranMindful of the philosophical and spiritual, Keshran gives readers an option: they can read at the surface of his poetry or they can move like “the current of the river” and choose “to seek what lies beyond this earth.” There is magic here.
“Tiger Swallowtail”, “Bulbpulse” and “Flamingo”
Henry StantonStanton’s poetry pulls beyond the words on the page. Is it a search for the “suchness” of things, the true self, the true reality? The poet refuses to be trapped in his corporeality to divine the “whatness” of self: “Tathāgata will be my next child.”
“We Are, We Were”, “Think Tragedy, Feel Comedy” and “Are we equal yet?”
Samuel GriffinMetaphysics pervades Griffin’s poetry, as the references to Newton, Heraclitus, Isaac, and Spinoza’s famous Deus sive Natura are instructive. Pay attention to the titles: “We Are, We Were,” “Think Tragedy, Feel Comedy,” and “Are We Equal Yet?”
“Dark Sun”, “confessing” and “nag, stone”
Frank HeatherAn existential fear of unknowing in Heather’s poems is made most explicit in “Dark Sun,” but it is also present in “nag, stone” and “confessing,” irrespective of the irony. Named: “this terror towards time” and “the swirling chaotic mystery of my past.”
“Drowning”, “Forms” and “Odysseus”
Theresa RyderThe transient nature of life is nowhere more keenly perceived as in Ryder’s poem “Forms.” The irony is obvious: “When I die the world will stop spinning,” and then this: “I will be a form, a shape, a number, a colour, a sound.” A transitory traveller.
“All Things Scarlet”, “From Primrose Hill” and “Untold Miles”
Carter VanceVance drapes “All Things Scarlet” in allusions—colloquial or personal—and metaphors intersect what is linear. In “From Primrose Hill,” the poet concretizes the poem in landscape imagery: “post-war tenement/brick ways, ” “many-wandered fields.” Metaphor reigns in “Untold Miles” in the first three stanzas but focuses on the “not-quite-lovers in the last.
“The New Adventures Of”, “Opa” and “When”
Chaya BhuvaneswarLike a page from a memoir in “The New Adventures of,” the poet rejects her father’s rants and repulses an arranged marriage. A similar feat is fulfilled line by poetic line in “Opa,” the poet having found a fire-opal, “no opal omen of/ruin.” And in “When,” the poet pleas for racial justice and names the names, “Book of remembrance, book of tears.”
Songs for Trying: “Losing Interest,” “Winter Blues” and “The Impermanence of Sinking”
Lacey BeamerThe metaphors of water and sun run through Beamer’s poetry, as if pool water and the smell of chlorine can “block the rest of the world,” and the sun’s sinking in the sea at night isn’t the same as drowning. So too “sunlight becomes a hard, palpable thing,” a corrective to her “winter blues.”
“You Ungrateful Girl”, “Wrong Side Out” and “Best Left Buried”
M. StoneRead 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.”
“The Dead Wall of Silence”, “Pieces” and “Scratching Out Earth”
Mark McCrearyIn “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.
“Don’t Hang Your Soul on That”, “Slant” and “Sugar Sandwiches”
Robert HillesWhen 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.
“An Old Song”, “The Incident” and “Acceptable”
Will RegerReger’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.”
“Purpose (Predestined Love)”, “Love” and “Frozen Dream”
Ann HuangHuang 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.
“To Pain”, “Bosom Story” and “I Hear You’ve Settled In”
Anastasia CojocaruIn 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.
“Money Buys You Freedom”, “Visible to the Eye” and “Searchlight”
Amanda TumminaroThe 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.”
“Surgical Intervention”, “The Plastic Faberge” and “Three Fates At Night”
Laura HoffmanPoetry 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.
“My Seventh Christmas”, “The Wind Gibbers with Their Voices” and “Jaco Pastorius (1951-1987)”
Christian KethAs 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.
Tomnahurich Poems: “The City of the Sleepers”, “Plaza of the Dead” and “‘Devoted Wife'”
David McVeyIn 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.
Bronx Poems: “Untitled 5”, “We are Loners (for my brother)” and “For Kalief”
Kay BellKay 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.
“Woe of Women”, “Farmhouse” and “A Semester at Chicago Arts College”
Shelby CurranYou 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.”