File Cabinet Heart is a unique lens that magnifies our everyday lives to show a sharper picture of our intimacies. Curtin’s poems are often weapons that fend off the dangers of closeness. They range from cautionary tales of the brutal truths of being exposed to a lover to the rebirth and forgiveness necessary to our navigation of life and love.
Everything I Know…, the new chapbook of poems by Anthony Frame, in which a suicidal astronaut tries to eat a banana, the Lincoln Memorial is turned into a drag queen dance hall, Kermit the Frog dabbles in existentialism, and Marvin Gaye covers Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.”
Bucolic and brutal, Farmstead, Fire, Field moves us through landscapes of farmland and longing. These poems explore the complexity of the rural with keen observation and gorgeous images: sugar maples trickling “in unison / from metal taps, sap boiling / off as honeyed vapor,” the barns and houses all painted the same “cheap red, / because, of all things, it is rust / and blood that are plentiful.”
In his debut chapbook poet Derek Graf pushes back against those forces that would box him in, define him: the night sky’s pitch blackness, the night sky pregnant with stars, a cold apartment in the middle of nowhere, an airport layover, dead birds in driveways, lost loves, the wonders and burdens of creativity in a universe that’s either indifferent or hostile
In The Storyteller’s Sister, Amber Holinger has mixed three genres into a perfect literary bowl, creating an original and remarkable work. Hollinger shows us “truth in pieces,” portrays Scheherazade in a new light, and molds veracity out of fiction until it becomes poetic and ultimately, unveils life’s Truths
Lori Lamothe’s poetry mini-collection Diary in Irregular Ink traces the connections between past and present, light and shadow, the sublime and the mundane. The poems fuse and dissolve to create an impressionistic, ever-shifting record of seemingly incongruous times, people and places: a nail salon in a shopping mall and a pattern factory during the Civil War, a mermaid in full moonlight and Joan of Arc, a seaside wedding and a post-apocalyptic backyard.