To read Telling You Everything is to come away refreshed and revitalized from Hochman’s, original way of looking at the world and seeking her place in it. This is what poetry is, this is what it can be. It comes out of a life fully lived. In Brooklyn. Where Hochman continuously learns something new from an old situation.
Category: Poetry Reviews
A review of Zen and the Art of Astroturf by Bronwyn Anne Rodden
In some of her poems Rodden asks questions that are profound and poignant. These are mainly questions about the absurdity sprouting in our world. I asked the poet if there was a thread in her poetry or a commonality and she answered: “Absurdism is something I think is relevant to people today, where we have been dealing with an international pandemic and environmental catastrophes, and people can relate more to the absurd than at many other times in history.”
A review of Wind—Mountain—Oak: The Poems of Sappho trans. by Dan Beachy Quick
Dan Beachy-Quick translates as if he is beside Sappho on her footpath to something quite never before seen and heard. A grove of oaks shake with mountain winds in the book title fragment from a pastoral world of alliteration, rhythm, and rhyme. Our collective species memory enlivens, quakes to a time when we were one with the natural world, calling out holophrases to goats and dogs, other herders, and goddesses and gods.
A Review of We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place by Kelly Weber
My copy of this book is filled with quickly scratched notes, annotation symbols only I understand, question marks, small open hearts, underlined sentences, circled words, messy smudges, angry creases. I struggled. I read and re-read. I wondered. I questioned. I chased. I stretched. At times I thought I might break, as well.
A review of Frank Dark by Stephen Massimilla
The book is replete with experiences of mental and physical crises, death and ghosts. Many themes resonate with the cover exploring sight/vision, the eye, the sea, the shore, and harbors. Imagery of light/lightning, the moon, lamps, clock, and swans recur throughout the book. The poems also display a sort of PTSD in the aftermath of near death experiences that he explores and shares with the reader.
A review of The Architecture of Dust by Chike Nzerue
Nzerue’s medical background brings a deep understanding of the topics addressed in this volume, creating imagery that transform the meticulous renderings of the medical field into an arena of understandable rhetoric. There are so many well crafted lines that it is difficult to pull the best to critique.
States that Matter, a review of The Best of Tupelo Quarterly edited by Kristina Marie Darling
As a poet, my ultimate aim is to connect to my reader, so that I may get close to causing a moment of understanding, a resonance, a tapping-into of the unsayable. As a human, I feel nourished when art is not only allowed to break the mould, but it is celebrated for doing so. The rules of the universe only help us understand a fraction of what is happening to us.
A review of Passages by Jenni Nixon
These are certainly not poems overflowing with sentimentality. Nixon has total control of her words, and is measured and diligent in creating and intelligent and elegant narrative in poetry form, whether she writes about helping a neighbour, the compulsory acquisition of hundreds of homes for the construction of tunnels or other environmental concerns.
A review of Text Messages from the Universe by Richard James Allen
This is philosophy at its best, to exist or not, or as Shakespeare put it “to be or not to be”. Allan makes you think, consider, and reflect, and he does it in a very clever way utilising poetic devices and intelligent lines. The poet’s voice is very convincing, whether he uses sophisticated language or everyday language, his unique style draws the reader into the narration.
Matadors Are Metaphors, a Review of When Correlation is Causation by Heikki Huotari
It would be limiting to call these prose poems or even language poems; they eschew labels. Better to think of them as ventures in language, in reality, in the probable, and the possible. To achieve a pattern, the poet uses a number of devices. “To the horseless carriage I say get a horse.”