Whether one is nimble and supple enough to actually practice the fifteen yoga positions that form the subjects of the poems in Robbi Nester’s Balance, one will discover that these poems do what both yoga and the best poetry have always done: take one deeply within the confines of an experience while simultaneously expanding one’s awareness of the limitlessness of that very same experience. Balance is both deeply moving and truly enlightening. R. H. W. Dillard

Balance

Literature & Fiction

Nester, Robbi

Poetry

White Violet Press

Sally Cook’s Making Music is a superb collection of poems from one of the most promising writers to emerge from the New Formalist movement in recent years. These selected published pieces touch on multiple aspects of the human experience, and the various ways in which all the arts confront that experience, whether in painting, poetry, music, or even the simple act of gardening. Cook’s voice is subdued and thoughtful, but also strong with the substantiality of a woman skilled in both the language of the visual arts, and the color of language. And in a poetic milieu that becomes more obnoxiously clubbish and obsessed with prizes and networking every year, she has remained independent, free, and unafraid. That in itself is a rarity these days. ~ Joseph S. Salemi, Editor, TRINACRIA

Making Music

Cook, Sally

The sonnets in This Sweet Order sit at the confluence of music, intellect, and philosophy. Some sonnet-writers are content to fill in the pentameter like a puzzle where form trumps meaning. For Catherine Chandler, word and idiom are primary; she bends the form into the service of the content. The poem announces itself as a sonnet only insofar as its structure (quatrain, octave, sestet, couplet) is integral to the idea. The subject might be a flower, a highway, a season, or a loss: expect wisdom; expect plenty of wit: expect surprises. If poems like 'Matryoshka' and 'Sonnet Love' are easy on the ear, above all they delight the mind. Chandler is a philosopher: 'Assembly', 'She', and 'Mother's Day' (for example) articulate thoughts with such immediacy that I almost feel as if I'm inside the poem. These are not poems that let you get away with just reading them. They bring you right into the conversation. ~ Deborah Warren

This Sweet Order

Chandler, Catherine

Janet Kenny sings—nowhere more so than in this new collection, This Way to the Exit. Music is the underlying trope, symbol and technique of Janet Kenny's outstanding poetic oeuvre, whether as the dedication to this volume ('to music'), or as the explicit (or implicit but vital) topic of so many of her individual poems ('To Franz Schubert', 'Celebrity Recital', 'Antal Szalai's Gypsy Band ...', 'Out Loud', ), or as the incidental figures within poems formally focused elsewhere ('Takeoff' or 'Mangoes'), or (to flip the trope) as Muzak, betokening the god-awful object of the poet's satire ('Butterflies'), or, most quintessentially, as the pervasive word-music that is the emblematic quality of this poet's work. Janet Kenny is a musician, and it really shows in this book. While always remaining true to her individual vision, her work should be placed in the Australian poetic pantheon not very far from Judith Wright's, for its richness, its finely nuanced responsiveness to Australia and its natural and human environment, and for its deep humanity. ~ Paul Stevens Editor, The Chimaera, The Flea, SCR There are only sixty-two pages here, not enough, not enough. Read 'Mangoes' and you will have read a perfect poem. Perfect poems are rare, as poets know all too well. By perfect I mean that the poem does not put a foot wrong, that not a word could be changed without altering the perfect balance. Robert Graves reckons have a dozen such justifies a life given over to his White Goddess. And Janet Kenny has one here. No, I lie, she has two. 'Moonlight as a Woodcut' is another. All the poems are worth your time, her time. For she is a poet, a real one. Buy this book. I shall. ~ John Whitworth

This Way to the Exit

Kenny, Janet

Able to see the funny side of anything (phobias, an awful guest house, the alphabet), Barbara Crane in her wondrous light verse is a generous giver ofdelight. She can dazzle with verbal high-jinks and turn a rib-tickling parody, yet she touches unexpected chords of feeling ("Night Flight" "Conjuring a Son"). Zero Gravitas ought to conrm her as a standout among those American poets who, while serious about their craft, don't take themselves too seriously. ~X.J. Kennedy

Zero Gravitas

Lydecker Crane, Barbara

Amytis Leaves Her Garden is a lovely, lyrical collection. I particularly admire the musicality of your indvidual lines. You write with an admirable density. ~ comments from Dana Gioia Karen Kelsay's distinct poetic voice descends not from the modernists, but from the 19th-century "poetess" tradition that is being rediscovered by feminist scholars. Kelsay is the editor of Victorian Violet Press poetry journal, and like flowers pressed within the pages of a Victorian album, her poems translate memorable experiences into compressed visual images, and vice versa. Lush passages of description and hard-earned lines of wisdom lodge in the reader's mind.  ~ Julie Kane, Poet Laureate of Louisiana 2012  Studying this collection, “Amytis Leaves Her Garden,” I am captivated most by author Karen Kelsay’s confidence in her audience. Hers is a verse to respect the reader at every turn – beauty without blind, trap, or land-mine, as secure in itself as it is in its reader. “I read my thoughts on some far distant night…” she writes in the poem ‘Quiet Flame’ – an apt epithet for the collection – “…green willow trees with soft Parisian light.” And, seated in her audience, I feel as though not only is that light my own possession, but –“far and distant” – the thought, as well.  ~ Jennifer Reeser

Amytis Leaves Her Garden

Kelsay, Karen

Stately and assured, Kim Bridgford triumphs over private, public, mythic and literary bullies in her newest volume, Bully Pulpit, a sustained book of poems that ranges wide and deep, shining a searchlight on the world of threats. Her crisp meters and deft turns of phrase take on “mobbing” to “bullycides,” intelligently moving us from examples of survivor-figures (like Rosa Parks) to literary victims (like Desdemona) and on to film icons, too. The growl of Norma Desmond bursts forth, and the electric and charming voices of the Triplets of Belleville. Are these the subjects of poetry? You bet they are, especially in Bridgford’s valiant hands. Molly Peacock

Bully Pulpit

Bridgford, Kim

These poems disarm me. I come to them like any reader might, "bowing to the terrible world," only to find Rothman whispering "Now you must give up those cares for charms." Through it all, these fine poems set me to shivering with recognition and laughing aloud at the many and varied ways the poet turns his wry plow at the end of a line's furrow. Rothman has tremendous control of music, tone, and angle of approach to his subjects, proof "A man knows how to sing/when he has to."  ~ Chris Ransick author of "Language for the Living and the Dead" David Rothman's latest collection effervesces with intelligence of the freshest kind—poems one reads not only for pleasure, but for their insights and revelations, as well. Rich with dark humor (as in the devastating sendup of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets in "A Letter Home") or with grief (as in the ambitious and profoundly sad meditation, “The Icicle”), the poems prove to the reader again and again that there can be tenderness in irony, beauty in disillusionment. If Rothman can claim that “darkness is a spark of sunlight,” believe him, because these poems are proof positive of precisely that. ~ Marilyn L. Taylor University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Wisconsin Poet Laureate, 2009-2010

The Book of Catapults

Rothman, David J.

Myrna Stone, the author of The Casanova Chronicles, a memorable sequence that is one of the best long poems in recent years, has moved from Casanova to her own father—and chronicled the texture of a relationship as well as the texture of a mind gone to ruin. These conversational sonnets demonstrate the elasticity of a form devoted to love; Stone also shows us that some of our greatest love stories are not the ones we expected. ~ Kim Bridgford Myrna Stone's "In the Present Tense" is a powerful work—not just because it chronicles the last, difficult years of her very elderly father ( in first class sonnets), but because of the sweep she achieves in documenting the orbit of all those involved: from family members to other assisted living patients. It's a breadth that only the best writers can acheive—sadness, yes, but also wisdom, fortitude, love, and even humor. As one of the sons whispers to his fading father, remembering the father's love of fishing: "Dad, it's time to catch the big one"—so does Myrna Stone catch what it's really like to deal with these tragic circumstances, and who continues to show why poetry, and her poems, are absolutely necessary. ~ Tim Suermondt

In the Present Tense: Portraits of My Father

Stone, Myrna

David Rosenthal's The Wild Geography of Misplaced Things takes us beyond the established borders of our ordinary lives into memory and its defiance of time, a place where things that may have been misplaced suddenly reappear and reveal their true nature, until we realize that nothing in Rosenthal's world that truly matters is misplaced or forgotten... It helps that rhythm seems to come as naturally to him as breathing. It helps that he knows the value of laughter and the dangers of too much restriction... It helps that he has a boundless capacity for tenderness... It helps that his clarity of purpose is never polemical or dogmatic, even when it is hard-hitting... Rosenthal makes the listening as instructive as it is delightful. Lynne Knight How lucky David Rosenthal's students are! They have a teacher whose perception of the physical world is as fresh, genuine and immediate as their own, whose language is as bravely, unashamedly direct, and whose desire to play-with words, images, ideas, experiences and things-is apparently as inexhaustible. And they're luckier still in the extras he brings them: the adult capacity to value all of those important and impermanent blessings, the poet's urge to preserve them in poems, and the wisdom to know that nothing else can. Come to think of it, his readers are even luckier-all of them, at any age. ~ Rhina P. Espaillat David Rosenthal is a very careful poet. I suppose that goes with the territory when one's profession is teaching little children. Like little kids, poems need to be cared for, even curated. Rosenthal sets his carefully chosen words in the silver chains of his lines, and the effect is lapidary. Purchase and read this book. ~ Timothy Murphy

The Wild Geography of Misplaced Things

Rosenthal,David

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