My Heresies
Alina Ştefănescu
Sarabande Books, 2025
Silence is a museum we enter speaking. Time is the time machine. Touch is the root that deceives the radar’s caress. This verse, grimheld. Grimheld, this verse. The decolonized vandalism of this verse. Verse as it de-translates its own final music in the pro-climactic body of Alina Ştefănescu’s My Heresies. Oh star, imagine a flare that discovers rescue. Oh humanly spun cobweb, hum dreamily our ear to betray some cocooned child orphaned of its silkworm petulance vibing while saying kill the rabbit before it makes the hole. The child, joking, of course. But we get serious. This is serious. I don’t like my death. The single question it asks is not sufficiently profane. I cannot in front of my children wear the clothes my dreamform shrinks. All sadness can be traced to surviving the inquiry. I was beheld in an egg by a bacteria enamored of cradling the belly button’s extra summoned eye. I don’t know how to learn. Curiosity, stage IV. I lose the coordinates of my surgery. An eel barters with yearning in the stomach of darkness. God is a coin dropped by time. That’s how long this lasts. By this I mean the not yet attempted circle indebted to the attended forwardness harnessed here in the fleeting searchedness of Ştefănescu’s double vision. I did at one time read books but they did not bell me to check my notifications. There’s a lot of salt in me. I don’t see myself. What I am saying isn’t important. Isn’t heard. Ştefănescu’s mirror is a thing peopled with a loneliness that impregnates everyone twice. I didn’t say much here. Leave this place where I said it. My Heresies is ongoing. Go.
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EASY TIGER
Evan Nicholls
Future Tense Books, 2025
I hold that Evan Nicholls is a scholar of deep sense. In poems and retitled images of original origin, the work as pasted into the copied beginnings of Easy Tiger is one or seven of an insistent reluctance to write what came before as a prayer overheard in a chapel erected in a field leftward of the anchored fact of our uselessness. I opened my gaze to the fish-caught world. I found my hopelessness still hopeless but tenderly surrounded by the brutally beheld. I’m not sure this is absurd. Nicholls plucks from our humanness its exiled objectifications and places them on a mood board for belonging to the extracted. Collage, sure, but collage rescued from its overlooked layering. Not just anything goes. This is sorrow cooking for a sadness that’s gained an appetite in a place voided of elsewhere. This is a comet losing god’s ashes. Blood gluing itself together in a pencil dreaming of a horse trying to sleep in a tree. What angel slang. What a deadline given to forever. Ah, Barton. Easy there brother. Anyway, imagine putting your finger on all the touch in the world. Then try.
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Burn The Losses
poetry
Antonio Gamoneda
Action Books, 2025
Memory never has enough time. I finish reading Antonio Gamoneda’s Burn The Losses, so noiselessly translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Victor Rodríguez Núñez, and call a toast, then, to the brain of oxygen. With backstories seemingly visible to amnesiacs only, Gamoneda’s verse addresses the trivial recollections of our most urgent forgettings and de-creates in a more discreet afterlife a body plotting its revenge on any new constant restlessness. The skin is a flooded sorrow and the body agony’s breathing box. To swallow this, you’d have to believe the egg never went off and that the sadly chewed piece of gum in its yellow was real. Starve your disbelief. Starve mine. Let childhood burn me like a horse. Let this work, for what it strips from repetition, echo.
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I Have Brought You A Severed Hand
Ghayath Almadhoun
Action Books, 2025
Ghayath Almadhoun’s I Have Brought You A Severed Hand, as woundedly clocked in translation by Catherine Cobham, changes the present without using time in a verse that pours milk over disappearing and reappearing blood. It is an absolutely beautiful, howling, undisguised, and sighing work, a pilgrimage of homage, an interest earned by yearning in nostalgia’s plastic cocoon, that pays with grey ransacked vividity the debts redacted from receipts of attention. Palestine is here, then there. As is Syria, Sweden, Germany. One can feel America pretending to be here, but love is too flooded a being. Language, too, is here. A light pining for glow. You can go home again, but cannot go housed. Almadhoun writes un- and re-policed in the nonfiction of the surreal, and hesitates so quickly one might go to pieces in a photograph of the lost lost. Saying a work is necessary is currently and old-head American. If I stop here, get this book. If I don’t, do the same.
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So Much More
Darren C. Demaree
Small Harbor Publishing (Nov 2024)
As it sings re-choired in the collection 'So Much More', Darren C. Demaree’s work is the starstuff of purpose and confrontation. Signs, tattoos, vacated crows. The un-reminded world. A shapeshifting violence that roots us to form. An offering of unrest carried in the body of a deerlike creature that touches nothing with its living while living in a believable church where sleep can be turned on and off by any two of three hooves. Demaree’s verse lets home take us home because there’s a second time to have nothing. No insect is a lost insect. We are not, and were not, long for heaven. There is no earth, but here we are. Our children lovely enough to be terrified.
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Desire/Halves
Jai Hamid Bashir
Nine Syllables Press 2024
Carried into recognition by an insufficient believing, I want to sound like I have held things. As for the sound itself, I can’t tell you how to hear. I think Jai Hamid Bashir’s ‘Desire/Halves’ might be a place maps listen to. With mouth as a memory center, Bashir’s verse makes its bones beneath silent orchards reddened by the respoken language of woozy flashlights. The mirror we’re looking at isn’t there and its snapshot memory is a bluesick reminder that despair is a string tied around the bruised finger of one who kneels in the dream just as an eyeball begins to sink through the moon. As such, when reading this work, we are near the body that exhumes image and not far from the brightly bored forms bathed in the local. Leave your eyes where they are. Unplug your angel’s lover into the gaslit déjà vu of touch. I will hold my belonging and I will lose it to this work, this half, gasping after the lyrical apostasies of its long hosanna.
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Outside The Joy
poems, Ruth Awad
Third Man Books, 2024
I hear, here, a remembered crying. I scrape forgiveness from Ohio to Ohio without a sound. I am in the bearable deepness of Ruth Awad’s latest poetry collection, Outside The Joy, where inquiry is a crop unjudged for the blueness of its yield. I want to tell you where I am that you know I’ve disappeared. Loss is an animal changing search parties in a museum dedicated to exhibiting the same, held differently, gun. This is a verse of hidden performance and dark display. Mother, sister, place, peace. Awad is a poet of the between-life, of old anger and resettled cure, and works this work into one of unmarked resettings to love the world with burnt care. How else, how else. Inside the inside, it shapes answer with response, and whole gods lose muscle to the memory of carried creatures.
kingsoftrain 