BEAR REVIEWS
.jpeg)
Rebecca Valley / May 8th, 2025
In Derek JG Williams latest collection, Reading Water, we are thrust into an aquatic world of love and grief. We find ourselves aboard a small and lonely boat, struggling to navigate a shifting landscape of feeling.
I angled the boat around the rocks
no map marked the bright passage I approached
a parting granted by trees gone skeletal...
.jpg)
Stan Galloway / May 2nd, 2025
Whether you’ve followed the work of C.D. Wright for years or are encountering it for the first time, this condensation of decades is rich, like that 94% dark chocolate you allow yourself only on special occasions. The Essential C.D. Wright (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), selected and edited by her partner, Forrest Gander, and editor, Michael Wiegers, provides the breadth of a single poet’s career all under one cover, leaving it up to the reader when to take breaks to breathe. Savoring is necessary....
Joseph Byrd / April 23rd, 2025
He was a volunteer at the Gaza zoo.
And in a way, because of If I Must Die, Refaat Alareer’s posthumous collection of poetry and prose, so are you.
A zoo, for all its captivating wildness, is still a garden, a place where what’s held is cared for (hopefully), inasmuch as what’s seen there is often unseeable in that elsewhere known as one’s daily life...
Jay Aja / April 14th, 2025
Our entrance into Philip Metres’ April 2024 poetry collection, Fugitive / Refuge, is a photo of the prow of a wooden boat looming against a backdrop of interwoven red thread strung with keys, a doorway into memory. In 2015, the Japan Pavilion at la Biennale di Venezia hosted this installation of Chiharu Shiota entitled, The Key in the Hand, during the 56th International Art Exhibition...
Nicole Yurcaba / April 9th, 2025
In Luisa Muradyan’s second book, I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated, grief, hope, and the immigration experience collide against the backdrop of everyday life in America and daily news from the devastating war in Ukraine. In the acknowledgements, Muradyan gives a thank-you that truly encapsulates the collection’s entire ethos: “And a final thanks to my ancestors, who built the stage I am on...”
Joseph Byrd / March 19th, 2025
Hold the phone.
I don’t mean your own. I mean that old, beige, melamine one that used to hang on the wall in the hallway, still warm from the hand that last held it; a phone smack in the middle of everything, and one that we all have to share...
Jay Aja / February 3rd, 2025
In Jessica Nirvana Ram’s debut poetry collection, Earthly Gods (Variant Literature, Inc., 2024), I located much of myself and my own journey navigating the complexities of culture, legacy, and personal growth as an Indo-Caribbean part of the Guyanese community. In Ram’s collection, she writes of the expectations placed upon Guyanese daughters: to caretake, to marry, to mother, especially as an eldest or only child...
