“Roots Music: Listening to Jazz” by Eve West Bessier – review

Eve West Bessier’s Roots Music: Listening to Jazz is a blast from first to last, a word feast from West to east. Each poem in the collection was inspired by listening to old jazz numbers. From Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and co, the poet found her bounce, her rhythm, and the linguistic playfulness that makes…

“Where You Happen to Be” poems by Leonore Hildebrandt

The title of this collection comes from a quotation by Buckminster Fuller, the genius who invented the geodesic dome. In his lifetime, Fuller was awarded 25 patents, wrote 28 books, received 47 honorary doctorates, and was such a globe-hopper that, legend has it, he wore four watches at once, each adjusted to a different time…

“Bestiary” – by Donika Kelly

A bestiary is a compendium of creatures – an illustrated book from the Middle Ages – with each animal symbolizing some abstract moral principle. They are there to show us foolish humans how to live by the divine code written by Nature/God. In Donika Kelly’s debut poetry collection, there are beasts large and small –…

“In the Room of Thirsts & Hungers: The Mirrored Tragedies of Paul Robeson & Othello” by Indigo Moor

I opened up Indigo Moor’s latest and quite phenomenal poetry collection and I was gripped from the first poem – the first stanza, actually. To say that Moor has a gift for language is like saying Einstein had a gift for math. The collection buzzes with resonant imagery and one-liners that read like epitaphs. In…

RIP Nicanor Parra, Chile’s anti-poet

Nicanor Parra always had the last laugh. By living to 103 and winning the Cervantes Prize – the highest award for a writer working in Spanish – he became “eminent” when all his life he’d been a contrarian. Parra dragged Latin American poetry into the streets. Rejecting all Romantic and flowery sentiments, he fashioned a…

“The Crown Ain’t Worth Much” by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

This debut collection sings. Forged in the fires of Columbus, Ohio, the poems are about childhood memories and community. If much of the work feels autobiographical, the collection transcends individual experience and speaks to anyone who’s ever watched friends fall apart, or got nostalgic over a piece of music, or been cheek to cheek with…

“Chinatown a toda hora y otros poemas” by Andrea Cote

Andrea Cote-Botero is a much garlanded poet and prose writer, having won The National Poetry Prize from the Universidad Externado de Colombia (2003), the Puentes de Struga International Poetry Prize (2005) and the Cittá de Castrovillari Prize (2010). Her work has been translated into a dozen languages. Cote-Botero grew up in a Colombia that was…

RIP Irina Ratushinskaya 1954-2017

Irina Ratushinskaya, the Soviet dissident poet and novelist, was a legendarily defiant figure. Sentenced in 1983, on her 29th birthday, to seven years in a labor camp for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” she not only survived, but wrote poems on bars of soap with the burnt ends of matchsticks. She memorized and erased them before…

“Another Door Calls” by Elise Stuart

Elise Stuart’s debut collection shimmers in the rain, gets snagged on the cholla, frees itself in the night winds, and goes rolling down a flooded arroyo. This terrific collection couldn’t have been written anywhere but New Mexico, Stuart’s spiritual home. Her familial roots lie elsewhere, but her narrative voice and sensibility reside firmly in the…

An evening with the maestro: Juan Felipe Herrera comes to town

The 21st Poet Laureate of the Unites States came to little Silver City this week. The place will never be the same. Herrera was a hurricane of ideas, poetry, stories, music and love. In front of a packed house, he talked (and sang) about his childhood, about his days tending farm animals, about his father’s…

“Notes on the Assemblage” by Juan Felipe Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera is a protean figure, a one-man dynamo: an actor, activist, professor, musician, author of thirty books, and now the first Latino Poet Laureate of the United States. His personal story is extraordinary. His parents were migrant workers, constantly on the move across California. He found an alternative path when he won a…

[Settled Wanderers] The Poetry of Western Sahara – by Sam Berkson and Mohamed Sulaiman

In Macedonia they sing of Alexander the Great. The Yoruba of Nigeria sing of the warrior king Onikoyi. In Western Sahara they sing of the folk heroes who have struggled and are struggling now for statehood while the world ignores them. In 1975 Morocco invaded Western Sahara. Since then, half of the population have been…