Kathleen Aguero

The three sections of Steven Ratiner’s artfully crafted poetry collection, Grief’s Apostrophe, take us on a journey through the pain of personal grief to broader social and historical tragedies and finally to the synthesis of grief into joys of everyday life.

Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree by Jennifer MartelliLily Poetry Review Books, 202482 pagesISBN: 978-1-957755-42-7$18   Those fortunate enough to be familiar with Jennifer Martelli’s previous collections of poetry will recognize in Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree her signature use of recurring motifs and unexpected juxtapositions. Fear of snakes, suffocation, images of dead plants

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.

All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes by Jennifer Martelli Harbor Editions Harbor Publishing, 2023 61 pages Jennifer Martelli knows things: hidden truths she reveals through repeated images and themes in her latest book, All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes. Many of these motifs have to do with violence perpetrated against women,

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

The Raincoat Colors by Helena Minton,Finishing Line Press(Georgetown, Kentucky,  2017),32 pages.   The first poem in Helena Minton’s The Raincoat Colors establishes much of the book’s tone along with its dominant themes.  “A family is a unit of measure” it announces/begins and four lines later, “A nuclear family is a unit of power.”  Many of

  Ninety-six, my father floats in a fearful dream, rises outside his body, but he’s stuck in the living room, which appears tilted at a surreal angle, ceiling fan coming out of a wall. Float somewhere nicer, my sister suggests. Havana, Athens, Cairo, places he traveled as a younger man, extra pages stapled into his

Critical Assembly: Poems of the Manhattan Project by John CanadayUniversity of New Mexico Press, 2017, 203 pages, $19.95   Meticulously researched and crafted, the poems in John Canaday’s Critical Assembly: Poems of the Manhattan Project present a nuanced view of the figures and issues involved in making the first atomic bomb. The use of persona

BEN BERMANauthor of Figuring in the FigureSolstice Poetry Editor in conversation with KATHLEEN AGUEROauthor of After ThatSolstice Consulting Poetry Editor   (Editor’s note: Kathi and Ben interview each other, using a more back-and-forth style than a traditional interview format.) Kathi: Strange Borderlands, your first book, took its impetus from, among other things, your experience as

Skin Music by Dennis HinrichsenWinner of the 2014 Michael Weaver Poetry PrizeSouthern Indiana Review Press, 201574 pp., $14.95 One of the great pleasures of Dennis Hinrichsen’s award winning poetry collection, Skin Music, is watching the poet consider large questions and concepts while paying careful attention to the specific details of the world. The opening poem,

I was a child, the height of a price tag that dangled from a coat, hiding among the dresses on the rack to stave off boredom. My mother and grandmother rubbed fabrics, inspected seams, scrutinized items from an arm’s length away. They’d pull a dress on me, off me, again and again — dull. But

Mouth

dark sea cave

The perfect measure drums across the line,

but once iambic’s lulled the reader’s ear

Hope springs eternal

but I couldn’t imagine how hope,

before it gets to that bubbling place,

forces itself through miles of dirt packed hard . . .

All winter I drove to work Oh, what a beautiful morning!

singing in my head as if I believed in the power

of positive thinking…

Voices fade then roar. Figures shifting

in and out of focus unbind his hands and feet…

Lazarus shoves them aside…