Death Poems

By Michael McClure

APRIL 2021 | Poetry

Since his 1955 debut at the Six Gallery reading where Allen Ginsberg first read "Howl," Michael McClure (1932-2020) has been one of the most significant and well-known poets in the U.S. Mule Kick Blues and Last Poems, the final book he completed in his lifetime, appears this month from City Lights Books.

Kevin Carey’s Set in Stone: poems

By Christopher X. Shade

JUL-AUG 2020 | Books

Carey renders poetic moments of breakaway energy in a tight game of memory, reflection, loss, and regret. He feeds the ball again and again to what hurts him. Carey eschews the technical for poems that ground the reader in a vivid place and tell as clear a story as possible.

3 poems

By K. Desireé Milwood

DEC 20-JAN 21 | Critics Page

K. Desireé Milwood is a Panamanian-American poet & author of Poems for My Namesake released in 2016. She is known for her witty & thought provoking style of haiku. She currently resides & creates in Newark, New Jersey.

Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon and Arachne and Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s Seeing the Body: Poems

By John Domini

JUNE 2020 | Books

Together, Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon and Arachne and Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s Seeing the Body: Poems go a long way towards providing this dark moment its definitive accompaniment. More astonishing still, the poets bring off triumphs distinctly different. You’d never mistake McSweeney’s heartbroken stammer for Griffiths’s blue wail, yet either outcry will set your back-hairs prickling. Either could wind up a prizewinner—though good luck choosing between them—and in any case the texts will go on providing their unique, adult consolations for whatever sorrows lie in wait.