Bachmann, Beth. Do Not Rise. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2015. 72 pp. $15.95 (paper). Reviewed by Will Byrne “The dead we__________burn; the living we bury in our faces.” _____~From the poem “shell” Beth Bachmann’s 2009 collection of poems, Temper—her debut—is a fascinating book: a true-life murder mystery twisted with familial tragedy, pressed down on [...]

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by Joseph Ross Though the Civil War is relatively distant memory, the story of the American South remains a conflict.—the reality being that the South belongs to the ancestors of those who fought under the rebel flag as much as it belongs to the ancestors of those who fought to escape the institutions for which [...]

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León, Raina. Boogeyman Dawn. Cliffs of Moher, Ireland: Salmon Poetry, 2013. 93 pp. $13.00 (paper). [View title on Goodreads.com] Reviewed by Brian Gilmore Raina León’s latest poetry collection, Boogeyman Dawn, ultimately wonders about our shadowy thoughts and impulses and where these ideas disappear to when the daylight, or perhaps the daylight within all of us, [...]

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Guerrero, Laurie Ann. A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying. South Bend, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 2013. 66 pp. $15.00 (paper), $15.00 (electronic). Reviewed by Niki Herd [View title on Goodreads.com] Contemporary poetry collections about war bring to mind, for me, the survivalist frame of mind that weighs the pages of Yusef [...]

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Jones, Saeed. Prelude to Bruise. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2014. 124 pp. $16.00 (paper). [View title on Goodreads] Reviewed by Will Byrne Saeed Jones’ debut poetry collection, Prelude to Bruise, is a juggler with many pins in the air.  Identity, sex, violence, coming of age, family, and loss—to name just a few—are all laid-out [...]

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Terez-Dutton, Nicole. If One of Us Should Fall. Pittsburgh, PA: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. 88 pp. $15.95 (paper). [View title on Goodreads.com] Reviewed by Khadijah Queen The traveling in Nicole Terez Dutton’s If One of Us Should Fall has less to do with wanderlust than it does with staging and restaging memories across a [...]

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by Abdul Ali A decade before publishing his full-length debut collection Fear, Some, Douglas Kearney was an active member of an all-black comic book collective, “Flatline Comics,” on the campus of Howard University. You can see an illustrator’s sensibility in all of his books, especially in their signature covers. This is most pronounced on the [...]

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Harris, Reginald. Autogeography. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 2013. 62 pp. $16.95 (paper), $16.95 (e-book). (Winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Book Prize — website) *_____*_____* Reginald Harris, former IT Manager for the Enoch Pratt Library, has moved on up to the big(ger) city of New York to become Poetry in The Branches [...]

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Laymon, Kiese. How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Evanston, IL: Agate Bolden, 2013. 144 pp. $15.00 ($9.99 epub). [View title on Goodreads.com] Reviewed by Daniel Peña In his debut collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Kiese Laymon opens with a series of letters to his Uncle [...]

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Dimitrov, Alex. Begging for It. New York, NY: Four Way Books, 2013. 96 pp. $15.95 Reviewed by Stephen Zerance [View title on Goodreads] The image that adorns the cover of Alex Dimitrov’s Begging for It—a photograph from “Rimbaud in New York,” one of David Wojnarowicz’s first major series of works—is an interesting introduction to this [...]

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