Though Lim engages heavily in an existential insistence of death, her poems often sharply turn, as though almost on accident, to a life-affirming image. She returns to the motif of a beating heart in several poems—an image that centralizes the self as at least part material body.
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Daniels’ Wedding Pulls is a collection rooted first and foremost in place, that place being New Orleans. Daniels uses place not only to ground her readers, but to present them with culture rich in tradition. Beginning with the proem “On St. Charles Ave.” Daniel’s sets the reader up for what to expect throughout the book: highly sonic, highly image driven poetry that explores not only New Orleans, but the institution of marriage and the traditions (i.e. wedding pulls) that surround it in New Orleans.
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Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Water & Salt is one of the most gorgeous renderings of the Levant I’ve ever read. Tuffaha, an Arab-American poet of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian heritage, writes from a place of familial memory and nostalgia, a place of longing and loss, of displacement and deciphering home. Tuffaha’s poems are required reading material for any Arab-American literature list, and for all Americans whose knowledge of the Middle East ends at what the media reports.
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Reviewed by Cloud Spurlock
Dana Levin is an accomplished contemporary poet having published four books of poetry in under 20 years. In the Surgical Theatre earned her the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, chosen by Louise Gluck. Copper Canyon Press published Wedding Day in 2005, Sky Burial in 2011, and her most recent book Banana Palace in 2016. Levin is largely anthologized for both …
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The title piece, “St. Trigger,” is constructed like shrapnel from a shotgun miraculously made into words flung upon the page. Each of the words is interconnected, originating from the same source, but disparate and dislocated and uncontrolled.
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