June is poetry chapbook review month at Reiter’s Block! I’ve been catching up on my large collection of small press gems, some newly published, some winners of contests from a few years ago. Like an exquisitely arranged plate of sushi, the chapbook is a perfect way to savor the bold, exotic flavors of poetry in
Chapbook Spotlight: Two Poems from Roberta Beary’s “Deflection” Read More »
Bracha Nechama Bomze’s beautiful debut book, Love Justice (3Ring Press, 2015), is a book-length love poem, a family memoir, and an epic of social change. The title’s multiple meanings are the seeds from which each of the book’s themes branches out and blossoms. As an imperative, “Love justice” recalls the Hebrew prophet Micah’s summation of
Workers and Lovers Unite: Bracha Nechama Bomze’s “Love Justice” Read More »
The final season of the AMC TV drama “Mad Men” begins this Sunday, filling me with anticipation and some first stirrings of withdrawal as I contemplate saying goodbye to my idol, Peggy Olson (above). How to keep the magic alive? Leah Umansky’s poetry chapbook Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014) sustains that lingering
Leah Umansky’s “Mad Men” Inspired Poetry Read More »
In Holy Week, which begins next weekend with Palm Sunday, Christians all over the world meditate on Jesus’s suffering and death. Catholics and some Episcopalians enact the liturgical drama of the Stations of the Cross, depicting the events leading up to the crucifixion. There are many ways to find ourselves in this story,
Lenten Reading: “The Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision” Read More »
Widely published author Ellaraine Lockie is known for narrative poems that capture the unique character of a place and its people. In her eleventh chapbook, Where the Meadowlark Sings (Encircle Publications, 2015), she returns to her native Montana to honor the land that her parents and grandparents farmed. This prizewinning collection includes humorous character sketches,
Two Poems from Ellaraine Lockie’s “Where the Meadowlark Sings” Read More »
Pamela Uschuk is a shamanic poet, invoking the spirits of animals, mountains, and forests, to heal a world that humans have spoiled with war and greed. Her latest collection, Blood Flower (Wings Press, 2014), also gives a voice to her family’s ghosts, starting with her Russian immigrant ancestors, and moving on to her late brother
Poems from Pamela Uschuk’s “Blood Flower” Read More »
R.T. Castleberry’s chapbook Arriving at the Riverside (Finishing Line Press, 2010) sings the ballads of a wandering man, that uniquely American character who is by turns a prophet, a drifter, a lover, and a wounded warrior. As he writes in “An Arrangement of Necessities”: “Tomorrow I travel,/see my headlights on the car ahead, lay my
Poetry by R.T. Castleberry: “Leaving Alexandria” Read More »
Winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Award in Poetry, Amanda Auchter’s exquisite new collection The Wishing Tomb (Perugia Press, 2012) surveys the cultural history of New Orleans over three centuries, in poems that quiver and shake with music and surge with the violence of floods. End-notes provide background on the incidents that inspired each
Two Poems from Amanda Auchter’s “The Wishing Tomb” Read More »
Poet and political historian Diana Anhalt moved to Mexico with her family in 1950, where her parents joined a community of left-wing expatriates who’d left the U.S. to escape Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist persecutions. She would live there for the next 50 years. The full text of her nonfiction book A Gathering of Fugitives: American
Two Poems from Diana Anhalt’s “Lives of Straw” Read More »
As April is National Poetry Month, I thought I’d give my blog readers some relief from the theological heavy lifting, and share some excerpts and reviews of the poets I’ve enjoyed lately. I picked up Heather Christle’s The Difficult Farm at the Octopus Books table at AWP 2011 because of the haunted-looking one-eared rabbit peering
Two Poems from Heather Christle’s “The Difficult Farm” Read More »