Layered and nuanced, the poems of Lost City Museum submerge us in worlds fashioned out of our world. We find ourselves in sea or fog, in petrified lava, in glass, in night, in an organ’s pipes of bones. And always, always, we are submerged in language that rouses and compels. These are deeply inhabited landscapes, precise and perceptive.
Ruth Foley’s masterful second collection emerges from the black-and-white shadows of the Golden Age of Horror, but these missives to characters we all know and, on occasion, love, refuse to cease their interrogations with nostalgic bromides or simplistic answers. The monsters here are not merely others; they are us, performed with a meticulous attention to history and detail that rivals our best auteurs.
What is the appeal of the miniature, of the simulacrum? What does the dollhouse reveal in its cut-away display of room upon connecting room with Victorian wallpaper, tiny utensils, a roast in the oven, teardrop chandeliers? In this chapbook, Ellie White takes us inside domestic spaces to show us a landscape of wild and disjointed nature, against and in which girlhoods unfurl and develop. In these sharply chiseled, dream-like poems.
The Pretty Machine will quicken your pulse. The Pretty Machine will hyperventilate you. In a good way. Everything about The Pretty Machine is urgent and necessary and damn beautiful.
Kinetic, wary, tense with language that switches gears, contradicts itself, Jessica Walsh’s How to Break My Neck is a collection that makes us readers hold on tight.
Judith Rooney reminds us that vivid objects, massed around those who are absent or estranged, may let us touch what we never could in the world. From cradle-jars to mothball pouches (a husband is even married twice!) all find their way richly home in these wise, sad poems.
Nina Bannett’s These Acts of Water traces a daughter’s journey through the depths of her mother’s mental illness. These beautiful, finely crafted poems chronicle love, loss, grief, and the redemptive power of memory. The intensity of Bannett’s imagery and her deft use of language cohere to form a tightly woven whole that demands to be read more than once. This unflinchingly honest collection resonates with courage, wisdom, grace, and the abiding strength that flows out of suffering but is never submerged by it.
In this deeply felt first collection, Kindra McDonald asks us to consider the great variety of unmeasured things nested inside “a simple life.” To read through these poems is to encounter the familiar at closer range, so we can see and experience anew what we might have overlooked before.
Each poem in this collection is a stepping stone in a swollen, stormy river, to the other side where a new wholeness awaits. They are rendered through the center of the fire with a sense of trust that fireburns away the unnecessary, to the necessary self.
The juxtaposition of the material and natural world is everywhere present in Larry Eby’s long work, Machinist in the Snow, where echoes of Whitman and Oppen accrue into an original voice that attempts to find a new spirit and home in “a post industrial world: / When the mechanism fails, remove / ice from jar: an engine labeled Body will ignite / a new fire.” Machinist in the Snow is a sustained, layered and compelling work.