Micro-Reviews
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Ariel Francisco’s Before Snowfall, After Rain (Glass Poetry Press, 2016) leads readers through a breathing portrayal of New York City where we come face-to-face with our own sense of isolation.
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Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s collection Malak (Platypus Press, 2017) creates a new language that helps us understand the metaphysical, the things we cannot see.
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Enikő Vághy discusses themes of heritage, trauma, survival, and inherited memory in Ruth Awad’s ‘Set to Music a Wildfire’ (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017).
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Jennifer Tseng’s “Not so dear Jenny” (Bateau Press, 2017), the winner of the 2016 Boom Chapbook Contest, is born from a 30-year correspondence with her father. These poems are intimate missives on parenting, longing, and heartbreak.
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Marlena Chertock’s collection “On that one-way trip to Mars” (Bottlecap Press, 2016), contemplates the beauty on the earth and in the universe and how quickly it can dissipate if we aren’t careful.
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Megan Merchant’s The Dark’s Humming (Glass Lyre Press, March 2017) speaks to the maternal experience in the most intimate and real ways: its joys, fears, and the eternal, overwhelming responsibility.
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Jessie Carty’s “Shopping After the Apocalypse” (Dancing Girl Press, 2016) contemplates solitude and the will to survive.
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In Sarah J. Sloat’s Heiress To A Small Ruin (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), household objects and common domestic scenarios breathe, grow, and make choices on every page, but there is nothing common about them.
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Kelly Lorraine Andrews’ “I want to eat so many kinds of cake with you” offers an honest, witty look at lust, lost love, and isolation. Seductive as cake.
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In Amy Strauss Friedman’s poetry collection Gathered Bones are Known to Wander (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016), the familiar is made strange and surreal, and what’s “real” is slippery at best.
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Tammy Robacker’s poetry collection R (Seven Kitchens Press) sets masculinity and the male gaze against female adolescence to heartbreaking effect.
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Janeen Pergrin Rastall reviews Amorak Huey’s Ha Ha Ha Thump, a collection that finds humor and beauty in every situation it encounters.
Agape Editions 