"Donora Hillard has mutilated the most pernicious stupidities of organized thought into a series of poems brilliant beyond any weaker instincts of faith." - Sean Kilpatrick

Theology of the Body

Donora Hillard

Gold Wake Press

The Silence of Sickness

Zachary Bush

Night Songs builds within its pages an atmosphere Proustian-no, not sentences running the course of many pages; no, not any simply measured loquaciousness. Rather, we find here a poetry concerned with music, subsuming into itself music's own mysterious structure: sentence as re-appearing theme, a music-like stitch that counters the discursive pleasures of the prose poems by calling the reader's mind back to what must be, or might be, remembered. Here, too, the night thickens with nostalgia, a form of memory that calls into question itself, revises itself, erases itself, categorizes itself-a music, I'd say, that wants to listen to itself to know its own song, to prove its melody to itself with only itself for evidence. It is a lovingly faulty task undertaken in poems just as lovingly full, lovingly faultless, trusting to the book's whole composition what no single poem can claim alone-the music entire. -Dan Beachy-Quick The mostly prose poems of Night Songs provide us with a poetry of subtle gestures that plays with the borders of reader/listener and creator/producer, that tangles with questions of order/mechanization versus life/subject. Through her use of music as a theme, Darling takes us on an exploration of poetics in brief but well-crafted pieces. -William Allegrezza Night Songs is a strange and marvelous collection. In a series of off-kilter narratives, Kristina Marie Darling describes the shifting interior lives of musicians, deconstructs a Victorian guide to music appreciation, then, word by word, erases her own poems. Here, the evening opens "like a black umbrella" while the audience murmurs. Later, a cellist practices as snow falls around him "like tinfoil under a phosphorescent moon." Musicians compete, fail, strive or fall in love-until the dim stage collapses "in a heap of shattered harpsichords." Lyrically subtle and technically inventive, these poems play with narrative and prose forms in ways I haven't encountered before. And they're deeply engaging. -Kevin Prufer

Night Songs

Kristina Marie Darling

"Man is a suffering delicate," proclaims Eric Beeny in Of Creatures, a poetry collection that circles the mind with a tentative, ticking confidence-a nervous bouquet waiting to burst. The petals distend, pregnant with brilliant color, radiating the naked shyness kicking within. Brace yourself for the birth, for Beeny's words surge forth, methodically, to wrestle the lure of contentment before snaking it into a headlock and then whisper kissing its ears. Just as quickly the dance recedes and the coupling severs, the face of one carried in the reflection of the other, an often bittersweet reverie raining down from a cloud or, perhaps, the moon. -MEL BOSWORTH, author of Grease Stains, Kismet and Maternal Wisdom Of Creatures is a delicate life-form. Its lines are inventive and brave; its stanzas surprising and strong. These poems are weighted by sadness, yet hope offers them wings. -MOLLY GAUDRY, author of We Take Me Apart Of Creatures is the propulsion of a heart in the chest of a child, mountainous underneath cold fall air that seeps through windows and into our beds. The disjointed phrases are our jaws unhinged from this body of wanderlust, from the whole of this poetic blood and moon, the tender savagery that Eric Beeny has us steeping in, wet with these delicately-natured fists. -J. A. TYLER, author of Inconceivable Wilson and A Man of Glass &amp; All the Ways We Have Failed

Of Creatures

Literature & Fiction

Beeny, Eric

Poetry

Sparrow and Other Eulogies is thrilling in its push against loss with every tool and tone--from grief to anger to embitterment to invention to farce to hope to mirth.  There is no well-lit path as her poems stumble toward truths, which appear in the most unlikely places and under the most unseemly of circumstances.  Even as substance vanishes, words emerge as "ointments, parachutes, fresh sheets."  Only a master poet can accomplish such a replenishment--and Megan Martin does so with the intensity of Rilke and the desperately comic energy of Lucille Ball eating candy off a speeded-up conveyor belt. -MAXINE CHERNOFF Megan Martin is a docent in the loss museum, where in the off-hours she taxidermies ghosts, plumps them with word-stuffs, and casts them in dioramas reanimation doesn't hesitate to visit on a nightly basis and sometimes even during the day. But, amidst the play, Martin reminds us exhibits are found not only in museums, but also in courtrooms, where we're asked to examine evidence of the violence narratives suffer at the hands of loss. If these pieces oscillate between a will to play and a mandate to mourn, on this court, resilience is the referee, and we're in the bleachers, applauding its every call. -KRISTI MAXWELL Myth, fairytale, love story: Megan Martin's Sparrow & Other Eulogies in uncategorizable and incomparable. Her lyrical and surprising choices pull you into a meditation on memory and mourning, with all of the hilarity, playfulness, and weight that truly accompanies those experiences. I didn't stop reading till I was done, and you shouldn't either: I found a million little toe-holds to build my own narrative within her loosely constructed--but intricate and structurally complex--world. -SARAH EATON

Sparrow and Other Eulogies

Megan Martin

Oblations

Nick Ripatrazone

History

Poetry. "SHOO-INS TO RUIN is actually five essential experiments in one volume. Our language is put to work in a variety of ways. It is fossilized and piled up, or it dashes ahead driven by romance as in the Knight Scenes, 'a lasting indentation on the air' where the poet assumes the form of a crusader talking to himself, passing through an epic, ever changing landscape. Evan Kennedy's phrasing is bound to be imitated. Only by aligning certain words together do we ever truly hear them on their own. I am reminded of the most obscure Stein (Painted Lace), Rimbaud, Herrick, Coolidge and Basil Bunting's Briggflatts&mdash;sheet music that makes my blood run clear! He is writing out of his mind, where even cast off lines have their own pull and rhyme."&mdash;Cedar Sigo "Think of him as a circus Beckett or a Beckett circus or an early Dylan of the early twenty-first century."&mdash;Lisa Jarnot

Shoo-Ins to Ruin

Kennedy, Evan

Erin Elizabeth Smith's The Naming of Strays is on fire in the best possible way--the poems sizzle with sensuality, celebrating all the senses in the way that the best blues music tips us from sadness into full-throated joy. The poems keep moving, shifting, defying expectations, singing the literal and the dream world, exalting the narrative and the experimental. I will recommend this book for poetry workshops as a primer on what poetry is and can do. And for seasoned readers, Erin Elizabeth Smith's work reminds us of why we fell in love with poetry in the first place. -MARILYN KALLET, Director, Creative Writing Program, University of Tennessee/ Erin Elizabeth Smith's poems are delicious - it is hard to resist them. But they bite back, and that is the thing: they're painful, too. And gorgeous, always. The Naming the Strays is luminous, intimate, and never afraid. - PAUL GUEST, author of My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge / Erin Elizabeth Smith's poetry is the impossible love child of a young Jorie Graham and a old bottle of Jack Daniel's. -T.A. NOONAN, author of Petticoat Government & The Bone Folders

The Naming of Strays

Smith, Erin Elizabeth

Literary

Informal Invitation to a Traveler is an epistolary exchange that exists uniquely apart from conventions of time and place. Alternately spare and lavish, a ghost narrative emerges of correspondences, echoes, and distances-raising questions of travel and renewal, home and seasons, abandonment and flight. With charm and intelligence, Hoag's and McCord's poems speak to each other, at each other, with and without each other. They are lively, keen, restless. They envision among the "rubbles of the cities" the possibility of a "home that lasts." -JAMES HAUG, author of Legends of the Recent Past Part baedeker, part intimate murmur, the poems in Informal Invitation to a Traveler suggest that identity itself is a kind of collaboration, a murky alchemy of thought, image, and language. At these poetic intersections, we find two voices bewitched by their own and one another's incongruities. What emerges is a dazzling study of perception: "How in one town we might be burning the monster,/and the next find ourselves listening to tides." -- KARA CANDITO, author of Taste of Cherry "The bridge of two voices across a landscape--one gorgeous, effusive, and intimate, the other stark and sorting. And the landscape? Flecked with small berries, nodes of sweetness, and hard weather, hard ground, and mazes of pretty but harming brambles. As you wake up here, poem by poem, Hoag and McCord invite you to consider what it means to let oneself wander and how much is enough. Evoking by turns whimsy, resolve, and dread, this is a terrific collaboration." -JOE HALL, Author of Pigafetta is My Wife

Informal Invitation to a Traveler: Letters between J.R. & Miss Kim

Kyle McCord

In the fine mesh of these poems Kristina Maria Darling recovers from H.D.'s correspondence a dream city suffused with Eros and a chilly nostalgia. Here delicate, archetypical image making is counter-pointed by the wry convolutions of her footnotes and appendices. Definitions dilate into images, memory, hieroglyphs moving us deeper into the vascular corridors of a mystical sub consciousness. Eat this lotus and do not worry about going home.  -JOE HALL, author of Pigafetta is My Wife  /Virtually no found form goes unfound in Kristina Marie Darling's The Body is a Little Gilded Cage. Footnotes and appendices, letters and lists, definitions and glossaries compound architecturally into a devastatingly well-dressed, fin-de-siècle whole. Bedecked in feathers, bones, buttons and flowers, Darling's fragments coruscate and clink together, catching the light, catching your eye like the most decadent chandelier, illuminating your way through "the arcades of a cathedral" and showing you "maps of the hidden rooms" where you might find the ghost of Hilda Doolittle under "a cold, white moon." -KATHLEEN ROONEY, author of Oneiromance (an epithalamion) / Might I make a suggestion to the reader finding his or her way to Kristina Marie Darling's The Body Is a Gilded Cage? Imagine the subjective experience of a chandelier. And not just because of the chandelier's resemblance to a cage, and not just because a chandelier is, at its heart, a collection of fragments, but because of the very intricately beveled edge multiplying throughout. Imagine the chandelier observing reality, and you will understand how to read Darling's book of poems. -KENT SHAW, author of Calenture / Told in footnotes, glossaries, and mysterious, incomplete letters, The Body is A Little Gilded Cage transcends and expands traditional narrative with delightful results.  Both sensual and sinister, it's a  story concealed in the deep folds of velvet curtains, revealed a little bit more with each spin of dancers, each turn of the antique phonograph.  -KRISTY BOWEN, author The Fever Almanac

The Body is a Little Gilded Cage: A Story in Letters and Fragments

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