MELTWATER

Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm

Poet and world-bender Claire Wahmanholm’s Meltwater—her third collection, out this month from Milkweed Editions—opens with an unraveling. Inviting the reader into a world beautifully crafted out of biology and memory, Meltwater steps into a liminal landscape where “the starry outlines of men float like bubbles between us and oblivion” and “you are already prey, and everything out here means you harm.” The instinct that ebbs within these poems knows motherhood as hunger, as thirst, as guilt and witness. As ever-shifting as it is ancient, this dystopia looks like me, like my mother, like yours, and it is dangerous. Life holds hands with death here and they both mourn.

How, then, does Wahmanholm manage to craft this insurmountable tragedy, this weight to carry, into life? The same way mothers do—by braiding prose, erasures, and elegies into sacrifice, where sacrifice is always love and sometimes already grief. “The baby / is so sweet that my eyes leak when they brush against her,” she writes and again I see my mother, I see myself as her firstborn and daughter, and I feel the urgency when Wahmanholm confesses “My mind / is a snarl of corners around which death is always / waiting.” I see the sharp edges, and I feel grief for what is still living inside this work.

And so I must say, everything about this collection explodes: the world at war with itself, the body at war with itself, the speaker at war with herself. The multitudes cratered by the explosions crawl into me as I read and begin to exist in this space between the pages. Everything is liminal. Everything is plural. “Everything was a wound that needed to be burned closed but I wanted to bleed out.”

Claire Wahmanholm is a poet of devastating inevitability, of all the living that comes after the apocalypse, and Meltwater is “a vast, organic machine / running like static behind everything.”

Milkweed Editions

—Review by Allison Flory

MEET ME AT THE LIGHTHOUSE

Meet Me at the Lighthouse by Dana Gioia

In Dana Gioia’s latest poetry collection Meet Me at the Lighthouse, published in February by Graywolf Press, memory is a dynamic force. With lines like, “No holiday is holy without ghosts,” Gioia leads us through the murky yet dimensional territory of remembrance. Poems jump between forms and themes: a ballad about the poet’s great-grandfather, elegies for the Los Angeles of his childhood, a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke. 

Gioia guides the reader through these leaps with ease, using a steady hand to tactfully construct bridges between such diverse offerings. A couple of times we slip into the current of nostalgia, but we’re never far from solid ground. In the hands of a lesser poet, the book’s structure could become distracting, but the former California Poet Laureate demonstrates his expansive range and experience without any notes of pretension.

Among the landscapes he draws for the reader, Gioia is generous with his personal history. The titular poem is addressed to his late cousin and conjures the familiarity of a real, long-shut bar populated by jazz legends. He evokes the Los Angeles neighborhood of his working-class childhood alongside its current condition as a “strange and empty land.” Perhaps most notably, Gioia’s final poem leads us through a version of Hell with packed subway cars and echoes of language from greats including Dante, T. S. Eliot, and Virgil. He shows his confidence in navigating this spiritual realm, perhaps demonstrating what he expects to stay with him through the end.

The collection feels like a mix between a guided tour of a dreamscape and an eclectic scrapbook; Gioia gifts us images that are clear and concrete, yet suspended in a realm that flirts with reality. I felt a delightful sense of discovery with the musicality on every page. These poems exist in a special sphere that “sings like a car radio, and no one / Asks your age because we’re all immortal.” Throughout Meet Me at the Lighthouse, Gioia’s use of formal techniques like rhyme, lyricism, borrowed language, and fixed forms invoke the comfort and rhythm of memory—how we erode the past into narrative gems.

Graywolf Press

—Review by Claire Scott

VILLAGE

Village by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs

In Village, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs has built a three-dimensional world in which poetry is embraced as a visual art as well as a written one. In addition to playing with form and punctuation, this collection acts as its own art exhibit, through its persona “The Artist.” The exhibit includes: a sculpture of The Artist’s Harlem, notes outlining directions for unusual memorial services, “a kind of selective glossary,” black and white photocopies of the paperwork bureaucracy tries to bury us in. 

These are poems about all aspects of life, including death, memory, addiction, kinship, Dove body wash, music recommendations, and that piece of home décor you got for a steal last week. Each page is filled with wit and certainty, playfulness and sincerity, danger, and a little heartache. Some poems use line breaks and white space in such a way that it looks as if the words were tossed from the poet’s hand like dice, yet there is confidence in every. last. decision. 

This collection exudes boundless imaginative energy and an unabashed independent streak, with one poem stating, “in order to disregard protecting / the identity of the people mentioned, / all names of personages & places / have not been altered.” In Village, Diggs’s imaginative funerary directions reveal a hope for a vivacious death, while personal artifacts and detailed memoryscapes show how ardently she grasps the life she has lived. In this work, The Artist is truly alive.

Coffee House Press

—Review by Sylvia Foster

BLUEST NUDE

Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe

Ama Codjoe’s debut collection Bluest Nude brims with paintings, photographs, and sculptures, which serve as more than source material for ekphrastic poetry; Codjoe brandishes art, particularly art created by Black women, as a medium with which to materialize her poetic project. Codjoe interacts with these artists and their work such that the poem that follows becomes an extension of the visual piece that precedes it, as if the poetry of now is grasping hands with the visual art of the past. 

One example of this timeless connection comes from “Detail from ‘Poem after Betye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,’” which meditates on Betye Saar’s 1972 piece. Time and image seem to collapse as the speaker “[beholds] a sea / of blood, dark as syrup, oozing / from Aunt Jemima’s neck, / and four women flying, without shoes / or wings, from her maternal, amber body,” making it clear that the liberation of Aunt Jemima is still ongoing. 

Juxtaposed with myriad artistic and cultural references are exquisite vignettes of personal experience. Various intimacies are entangled in the soft and moody language of this collection, which nurses a quiet eroticism throughout. Codjoe explores all the possibilities of womanhood and sex, from being perceived in the “fractured angles of sex” to the speaker’s lament, “Oh, to be a stone, sexless and impenetrable.” 

The simultaneous desire for sex and sexlessness is echoed in the coexistence of motherhood and non-motherhood. Codjoe asks, Is it labor that makes a mother? If so, which kind(s)? The ambiguity of mothering leads to one of the most electric moments in the collection: “I hid / my tears from my mother because that’s what mothers do.” Here and throughout Codjoe’s work, womanhood undulates and continually unfurls.

Milkweed Editions

—Review by Sylvia Foster

JUDAS GOAT

Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates

I tried to write a sentence that would sum up what this collection is about—loss, or love, or growing up as a girl in the South—but all of those words felt reductive, because Judas Goat is a living thing. Its unifying force: Gabrielle Bates’s incredibly observant voice and haunting imagery, which can turn a poem about a college football game day into something absolutely transcendent. 

As someone who grew up in Mississippi, I appreciate the way that the South is rendered in this collection. There are so many different versions of the South, and the one that often makes it into our collective consciousness isn’t one that ever felt real to me. But this collection feels real, thanks to Bates’s astute observations.

There is sharpness at work in Bates’s handling of the psyche as well. Here’s a quote from the poem “The Mentor” that will be with me for a while:

You ask when I stopped shouting everything  

and started keeping language close to my mouth  as if I were reading to a match that had to last my life. 

Well it was not that day. That was much later,  after the trees had all been cleared and the earth 

leveled. When I stopped begging to be believed  and started telling the truth, no man was there.

For me, this is a perfect description of what the violence of patriarchy and the South does to women—to their bodies and their minds. I felt these lines in my bones, as I did most of this collection. Gabrielle Bates takes the material around her and fashions it into something beautiful and devastating and real, and this review can’t come close to doing her collection justice.

Tin House

—Review by Sarah Barch

THUNDERBIRD INN

Thunderbird Inn by Collin Callahan

I’ll begin on a personal note: I was still an undergrad at the University of Arkansas when Collin Callahan was here completing his MFA in poetry. I remember his fourth-year reading well. I marveled at how his work invited ordinary elements—roads and motels—to be bound tightly together by his contained lines and lyrical language. But this review is special to me for another reason: Collin was one of the Arkansas International’s founding members.

In Thunderbird Inn, the speaker tells a story of a bender across America. We traverse at their side, along with their friend Richard, across desolate landscapes, zooming in on lackluster places: tunnels, motels and inns, buses, jail cells, parks, and more. Destinations like the Twinkling Cow in “Dreamland” break open a curious brand of love. “The wind is / a milkshake / blender cup,” the speaker recounts. Within the collection, love is inextricably tied to place, but the link is troubled. Many of the poems are shaped like coffins; death-stricken structures with startling descriptions like “razorblade shadows,” “scarecrow of rabbit bones,” and a nacho machine that “vomits gold,” revealing the collection’s devastating truth: that this love comes with its risks.

In “Milk Tooth,” the speaker tells how “a mouse / gnaws its pink leg,” and desperately pleads, “Look at me. / Tell me I matter.” This desperation is what drives the collection toward not so much a hopeful triumph over decay, but rather an opportunity to examine the many places on a map overlooked. And like the tired driver remarking at some motel off the side of the road, we become part of a collective of passersby, leaving behind parts of ourselves with the things we pass.

Conduit Books & Ephemera

—Review by Elizabeth Muscari

SHORT FILM STARRING MY BELOVED'S RED BRONCO

Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver

Winner of the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, K. Iver’s Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco is the poet’s debut collection, and an intimate tribute to “Missy,” the speaker’s transmasc beloved who “never got his new name” and died by suicide. Iver’s poems meditate on cycles of abuse, queer love, collective griefs and traumas—the undercurrents that led the speaker to where they ultimately leave us. 

The collection complicates its own elegiac beat. Look to “Anti Elegy,” its lines split almost into half-lines, as though the caesuras might forge a route from top to bottom—like some kind of fracture or crack of the heart. Almost stubbornly, the poem imagines how the world would be with Missy still in it: “You might’ve / struck the impos-   sible: surgery, / a new name, your   own boat, & / someone beautiful   to name it after.” But the speaker quarrels with the ethics of their grief, which they describe as “righteous / & problematic.” 

After terming their grief “a loose dam,” they write, “Still, I talk to water   that unrivered / your body for dirt.   I float fantasies / of dirt that holds   us up. Longer. / I say to the water   if you were here, / you’d be here.” 

So, too, the pauses in the poem’s lines come to “re-river” the body of the speaker’s beloved; the speaker takes the matter into their own hands.

The poems are truly in a league of their own; I’ve never read another book like this one. Such a magnetically raw exploration of grief is a gift—and a comfort, to those who seek it. 

This collection couldn’t come at a better time, needed amidst heightening anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiments and attacks on trans healthcare, as well as trans lives. After reading this book, each time I see a headline that sears my heart, I think of a particular moment in Iver’s poem, “Mississippi, Missing, Missy, Miss—”: “That is to say I am inconsolable. / Every day a new definition // of inconsolable. Yesterday: I have a body / and you don’t. Today: your villain is a place.”

Milkweed Editions

—Review by Jami Padgett

DOT

Dot by Ron padgett

Celebrated poet Ron Padgett’s latest collection Dot is a refreshing read for its wisdom and levity, or perhaps for the wisdom in its levity. In his notes on the title, Padgett asks the question, “How short can a title be and still be effective?” and explains how he was drawn to the word “dot” not only for its shortness, but also for its resonance. It’s those ideas of resonance and brevity that carry this collection. Padgett’s poems are wise, and heavy, and about the nature of reality and existence, of loss and love and growing old. But they are also short, and full of laughter. They are made from levity in the way that a comic book is made from hundreds of dots, and the way that our lives are the sum of so many small moments. 

I was struck by how enjoyable of a read this collection was, and most of all, how it came across as effortless, never trying too hard (what the actual craft process is like, however, for creating poems that manage to come across as effortless, is beyond me). In his longer poems, Padgett’s loose associations feel both delightfully surprising and completely natural; in the prose poem “Both of Me,” for instance, how could I have anticipated that the humorous linguistic observations that begin the poem would transition to the subject of a box of matches, then to a portrait of Allen Ginsberg painted by Alex Katz? And yet I find myself trusting these turns without question. 

This feels like a byproduct of Padgett’s steady, confident style. He is not proving anything to you. He does not have to. While reading his collection I felt this in my bones, and what a calming feeling this was to have as a reader. And so I’ll leave you with a short little poem that I love, called “Bubble,” so that you can see what I mean, too:

It’s a very great pleasure

to walk with you in November,

our bodies sleepy in the clarity

falling across the city

and to feel a kiss alive

from a height of five feet two

and new shadows on my shirt

rising and falling as I live

and breathe with you.

Coffee House Press

—Review by Sarah Barch