The Only Card In A Deck of Knives by Lauren Turner

About the author: Lauren Turner is a disabled poet and essayist, who wrote the chapbook, We’re Not Going to Do Better Next Time (knife | fork | book, 2018). Her work has appeared in Grain, Arc Magazine, Poetry is Dead, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Puritan, canthius and elsewhere. She won the 2018 Short Grain Contest and was a finalist for the …

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the broken boat by Daniela Elza

In the broken boat, her fourth book of poetry, Daniela Elza deftly builds a raft of questions to stay afloat amidst the breakage of things. The end of a twenty-year marriage mirrors subtler fragmentations in our world. How to survive this loss of meaning, this “wintering through”? [dropcap]I[/dropcap] was isolated. Isolating. Like everyone, more or …

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Pluviophile by Yusuf Saadi

Pluviophile veers through various poetic visions and traditions in search of the sacred within and beyond language. At the risk of resembling a middle school English report, let’s start with a definition. Pluviophile – (n) a lover of rain; someone who finds joy and peace of mind during rainy days. And so we join Yusuf …

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We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite by Conyer Clayton

[dropcap]The[/dropcap] first line from the poem “Seeds” in Conyer Clayton’s debut collection We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite out with Guernica Editions is “I pray to catch on fire” which puts me in mind of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s lines, “who made me as the world’s / first person, breathing / Fire and poetry.” Perhaps it is …

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Walk Away Silver Heart by Frank Prem

I’m a fan of the ekphrastic medium – inspired creativity, examples of life imitating art, or more accurately, art imitating art, building on the existing with fresh interpretation. Poet Frank Prem leaps into the genre with his poetry, inspired by Amy Lowell’s Madonna of the Evening Flowers.

Curtis LeBlanc’s Birding In The Glass Age Of Isolation

[dropcap]In [/dropcap]Curtis LeBlanc’s Birding In The Glass Age of Isolation, mental illness, masculinity, and storytelling are all explored in this worthy follow-up to his first book Little Wild (2018). Like the hunters he writes about, LeBlanc practices patience and careful observations leading readers through poem after poem as he seeks a verbal equivalent for the …

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In The Vicinity of Riches by Chris Hutchinson

In The Vicinity of Riches by Chris Hutchinson is a poetry collection that takes a hard look at Late Stage Capitalism through the jaundiced eye of a poet whose Romantic sensibilities are constantly under attack by a society obsessed with virtual fame, iPhones, petrochemicals and antidepressants.