Praise / ReviewS / Interviews
Encounters for the Living and the Dead by Jameela F. Dallis
"Rich and sensuous, Dallis’s debut, Encounters For the Living and the Dead, weaves together ekphrasis, clear poetic imagery, and the eternal sounding of the sea to create a portal through which reader becomes witness, and prosaic contains holy."
Christina Linsin, South Florida Poetry Journal
"...what truly made the collection’s repeated image [of the oyster] shine to me was its subtlety. Undertones, images, and evolving relationships unite the poems, give the collection its resonance and structure, haunt the progression with a natural, flavorful, and aromatic trail, but also give way to the speaker’s journey, thoughts, and perspective."
Lillian Durr, Dogyard Mag
Your Mother's Bear Gun by Corrie Williamson
Will Briggs, Editor, Central Montana Poet Explores Natural World in New Book, Lewistown News
"Williamson’s Your Mother’s Bear Gun is a journey of landscape and memory, of finding the glitter among the broken landscapes of our lives. It is a guide on creating beauty and safety despite a world that could and often does harm because, as Williamson writes in 'Adaptation,' 'that’s how you veer to live.'"
Amanda Auchter, Rhino Poetry
Pastoral, 1994 by Joe Wilkins
"...how carefully Wilkins tends the people and the land, land he describes in 'Genealogy' as a place where 'I rode in the pickup bed / I sat on a chain little bits of dry shit & straw / wheeling in the roadwind in one distance / mountains in the other distance.'
Christina Linsin, South Florida Poetry Journal
A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us by Carla Sofia Ferreira
"Even in the face of a hyper-politicized educational climate, which has placed more scrutiny than ever on what teachers say and do, Ferreira’s book unapologetically presents the poet-teacher as a vibrant, several-dimensional, multilingual singer of the many sorrows and joys of life, and in particular of the education it has in store for all of us. The book is a record of many different ways to make sense of the world in verse, and dazzles as much for its pluralism as for the emotional, formal, and imagistic precision of its poems."
Tom Snarsky, Moist Poetry Journal
"...Ferreira is a musician on the page, her verse offering solace amidst the crises that have overtaken our world while giving readers the beautiful language necessary to find acceptance."
Alex Gurtis, Rain Taxi Review of Books
"This is a collection of intimacies…between family, ancestors, with terrain and with history."
Evelyn Berry, author of Grief Slut, TikTok Review
Dear Memphis by Rachel Edelman
"Edelman treats weighty subjects and complex emotions with masterful nuance, using questions and the comments of others to fill in the dotted outlines and white spaces between the mostly short, often staggered lines of these spare, resonant, abstraction-free poems. Despite the weightiness of their concerns, these poems are never heavy-handed or moralistic, and Edelman’s speaker is humble and honest about her role in a world of damage, injustice and inequality."
Rebekah Wolman, Psaltery & Lyre
"Through Dear Memphis readers are granted perceptive freedom for bodies at different axis of intersection — personal, familial, cultural, environmental — and how each of these intersections converse with each other."
Cody Stetzel, Tupelo Quarterly
"The lyrical quality of the poems does much of this work, but I’d like to name something else: intimacy.I’m enamored by the ways Edelman brings me into the private space where the speaker explores and affirms her sense of self by actively engaging with Memphis, with family and with memory."
Carolee Bennet, Reading Notes on Dear Memphis
"Dear Memphis is a book I felt carried into; its poems driven by lyric concerns as much as telling the story of the author’s relationship to place."
Erin Hoover, Southern Review of Books
Bullet Points: A Lyric by Jennifer A Sutherland
"Bullet Points reminds me of Penelope, weaving and unraveling in order to keep at bay what society has decided to accept, but which she has not. The poem contains a structure, created by a poet whose mind ranges over a vast array of subjects which thread together to tell a coherent story with coherent criticisms, while also leaving space for the reader’s own connections, imaginings, and outrages."
J.D. Ho, Fugue Journal
"I’m so drawn to “Bullet Points,” to its thorny, stark truths about how we bring forth the stories buried inside, whose expulsion from our bodies are both a relief and an edict."
Leslie Gray Streeter, The Baltimore Banner
"This compelling and challenging work, existing somewhere in the liminal ground of extended prose poem and fragmented lyric essay, invents a form to capture the experience of trauma."
Anne Myles, North American Review
"The lyricism shines when it comes to feeling and attempting to hold the aftershock of the events she has gone through."
Willow James Claire, ANMLY
Willow James Claire, ANMLY
“…an intricately woven tapestry, slowly unraveled…”
Sara Stoudt, Psaltery & Lyre
An Eye in Each Square by Lauren Camp
"Lauren Camp’s poetry is remarkable for its ability to bend time, its unexpected word choices and collage of extreme landscapes, ordinary events and bold feeling statements."
Karin Falcone Krieger, Tupelo Quarterly
"It is this intimacy between artist and poet, art and landscape, that shapes An Eye in Every Square. An intimacy that the reader enters as if we are along for the residency, the speaker’s long walks and her exploration into Martin’s life and work, and ultimately her own life—her grief and longings."
Heidi Seaborn, The Adroit Journal
"...these are poems of our catastrophic time—of smoke and schism, love and abyss, vigil and disquiet."
Richard Oyama, Rain Taxi Review of Books
"Camp achieves a fine balance between independence from, and allegiance to, her subject."
Rebecca Morgan Frank, in LitHub's 7 NEW POETRY TITLES TO READ IN JUNE
"This is the idea and purpose [Agnes Martin] and [Lauren Camp] share—the power and expansive possibility of the line, and their devotion to it."
Irene Cooper, in EcoTheo Review