BEAR REVIEWS

On At the End of the World, There Is a Pond by Steven Duong

Matthew McBride / August 19th, 2025

Sometimes I’ll take my daughter to an “independent” Zoo near me. We live in a rural area, and it’s the only one within an hour’s drive. Her favorite thing to do is feed the koi. There are well over a hundred, and the water boils with them. Next to their pond is a hand-painted sign asking guests not to throw coins into the water. This is the first association I made when I picked up Steven Duong’s debut collection, At the End of the World There Is a Pond, and the connection is fitting. A wish is asking for our lives to be moved in another direction. It is a kind of displacement. Money, too, is a displacement; money is a repository for all wishes...

Review of Ashley M. Jones’s Lullaby for the Grieving

Richard Hamilton / August 12th, 2025

How would you aestheticize grief and haunting? What sorts of challenges to narration, composition, and history do writers adhere to or resist when grappling with the primacy of an event (past or present)? How do we honor spirited visitations? Do we ever risk blunting the experience and memory of ghosts and the ghosted by attempting to speak to and reproduce the psychic circuitry germane to the relation between the living and the dead in linear terms, using market-safe conventions...?

Fatherhood as Wound Work: A Review of Bobby Elliott’s The Same Man

Susan L. Leary / August 5th, 2025

Bobby Elliott’s The Same Man, selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, focuses on two interwoven narratives, the speaker navigating new parenthood against the backdrop of his complicated relationship with his father. Bold yet subtle, spare yet utterly intense, Elliott demonstrates a sensitivity to the deeply painful, specific, and idiosyncratic nature of family dynamics, a sensitivity that reveals itself in the opening lines of the first poem, “Mondegreen.” Here, the speaker captures the unremitting nature of childhood memory, his father positioned at the center of every wound...

“Remember when:” A Review of Duy Đoàn’s Zombie Vomit Mad Libs

Nicole Yurcaba / July 29th, 2025

Vietnamese American poet Duy Đoàn—in these poems of love, hope, rage, and dystopia—have the potential to reshape the contemporary poetry world. In Zombie Vomit Mad Libs, a blank page is not simply a blank page. Each page is a canvas on which Đoàn uses words like some artists use mixed media to unite the humane, the easily perceptible, the Kafka-esque, and the abstract. From jarring one-line poems that sear themselves into readers’ memories to longer punk rock-esque monologues, these poems dare to balance on life’s edges and peer into the depths in order to confront the grotesque, rearrange destruction’s aftermath, and find hope in the most dismal abysses...

The Goodbye Kit by Daneen Bergland

Pamela Manasco / July 21st, 2025

The Goodbye Kit by Daneen Bergland

If Daneen Bergland's debut poetry collection, The Goodbye Kit, had a single throughline, it might be this: yes, the world is ending, and yes, it's our fault. Take your pick of apocalypses; of course there are ecological concerns, of endangered species both animal and plant, which Bergland writes about with a deft, lush, self-aware voice and striking lyricism, but the speaker in this collection is at the center of a number of worlds...

The Stuff of Hollywood by Niki Herd: A Tombstone of Response, Both Eulogy and Ekphrasis

Jay Aja / July 21st, 2025

The Stuff of Hollywood by Niki Herd: A Tombstone of Response, Both Eulogy and Ekphrasis

In The Stuff of Hollywood, Niki Herd connects the rise of the silver screen with the prevalence of guns in American culture, both of which have attained a godlike status in American mythmaking, the implication being gun-slinging heroes garner worship—the insidious motive Herd underlines in her collection: white supremacy. Herd incorporates police reports, scripts from film and media broadcasts, and photography that coalesce to form a case study of the role of the camera in furthering gun violence...

What am I/who am I/? - Joseph Byrd on Iain Haley Pollock’s All the Possible Bodies

Joseph Byrd / July 16th, 2025

What am I/who am I/? - Joseph Byrd on Iain Haley Pollock’s All the Possible Bodies

In “Is You Is, Or Is You Ain’t? (An Answer Becomes a Set of Further Questions),” Pollock writes:

…historical records and family lore suggest 19th-century Pollock forbears

were forced from the Scottish Highlands during the Clearances while the

reddish tint of my father’s beard suggests a Viking in the woodpile—the

colonizer and the colonized again rehearsing their psychodrama within the

double-helix of me). What am I...?

Review of Steven Leyva’s

The Opposite of Cruelty

Won Lee / July 7th, 2025

In Steven Leyva’s The Opposite of Cruelty, Creole is not only a matter of genealogy but a structuring principle applied to the book itself. He writes in the second section’s opening poem “Double Sonnet Instead of an Introduction”:

“Nearly every continent is in your genealogy:

You are Black. You come from a Creole

so old no one can skin the pear of your first

language…”

The Self Within the Self, The Worlds Within the World: A Review of Michael M. Weinstein’s Saint Consequence

Nicole Yurcaba / June 30th, 2025

In Michael M. Weinstein’s Saint Consequence, readers traverse the unpredictable territories of disease; the liberation of gender transitioning and accepting one’s queerness; and the tumultuous and frequently turbulent relationships with family as one strives to accept who they are. Each poem is its own world of pain and reckoning. Meanwhile, the tough Siberian landscape serves as a natural mirror for the speaker’s transition and their battle with an autoimmune condition that left them chronically disabled...

Review of Fixer by Edgar Kunz and The Ledger of Mistakes by Kathy Nelson

Liza Duncan / June 24th, 2025

Part of the project of being human is to be both a maker of mistakes and one who tries to fix them, to contain both creative and destructive impulses, and to grapple with what it means to hold these contradictory selves. How do we account for our own and others’ mistakes, and can they ever be repaired? These questions are at the heart of two recent books of poetry about imperfect parents and their adult children’s attempts to forgive the unforgivable. Kathy Nelson’s The Ledger of Mistakes and Edgar Kunz’s Fixer struggle with their speakers’ disappointment at the mistakes they’ve inherited, their far-reaching consequences, and how a person’s creations and destructions define their legacy...

Review of Plat by Lindsey Webb

Rebecca Valley / June 16th, 2025

In Lindsey Webb’s debut collection, Plat, heaven is a place on earth. From the very beginning, we are confronted with Joseph Smith’s vision of a “celestial city on earth” — a community of grids and gardens, perfectly ordered, perfectly designed to contain a neat and tidy God.

And yet...

Arthur Sze's "Silent Way": A Review of Into The Hush

Brandon Lamson / June 9th, 2025

Arthur Sze's new book Into The Hush welcomes readers through the immediacy of its poems as the collection gradually coheres into a single calligraphic gesture. This gesture, comprised of the body, the brush, and the character, or kanji, embodies a relationship between all things described in Buddhist terms by the word emptiness, which connotes the way that all phenomena are interdependent and devoid of solitary, stable existence. In these poems, this interdependent relationship is expressed through radical flux, disjunction, and metaphor. Woven throughout the collection is a longer poem titled "Zuihitsu" that describes a calligraphy writing session in which the speaker is guided by a teacher....

A Review of FREELAND by Leigh Sugar

William Ward Butler / June 5th, 2025

The opening page to FREELAND by Leigh Sugar reads:

Freeland, Michigan is home to the Saginaw Correctional Facility, a Michigan state prison.

Leigh Sugar’s FREELAND is a book of obsession and careful analysis, one that constantly turns over the reality of incarceration in the United States in order to examine it from a variety of angles. For much of the book, Sugar’s speaker corresponds with an incarcerated writer, referred to as a beloved, and many of the poems in this collection map their relationship and how they must contend with the reality of one of them living in confinement.

Poetics as Temporal Landscape: A Review of When the Horses by Mary Helen Callier

Lindsay Rockwell / May 28th, 2025

When the Horses, by Mary Helen Callier, is everything elegant and nothing simple.

Callier’s capacity to embed the ordinary in both linear and non-linear landscapes is a tour-de-force, a choreography of intellect rooted in the somatics of image and metaphor. Each poem is a world, and when interwoven into the body that is this collection, in seven numbered sections, I am left speechless and sated. The opening stanza of “Tonight I Think My Body Is A Lake” brings this home....

Transcontinental Reconstruction: A Review of Sarah Uheida’s Not This Tender

Stan Galloway / May 23rd, 2025

The epilogue of Not This Tender quotes, in part, from Mahmoud Darwish, and creates not only summary but a kind of thesis for Sarah Uheida’s collection as well:

The poetry of exile is not what exile says to you, but what you say to it,

one rival to another. Exile, too, is hospitable to difference and harmony. So

fashion yourself out of yourself....

A Review of Derek JG Williams' Reading Water

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...

C.D. Wright, Person and Poet: A Review of The Essential C.D. Wright

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....

Review of Refaat Alareer's If I Must Die

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...

The Qasida and Inheritance in Fugitive / Refuge by Philip Metres

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...

Everyday Life and Ancestral Memory During Wartime: A Review of Luisa Muradyan’s I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated

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...”

even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety by Irene Cooper

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...

“Desideratum: Re-incarnating and Re-creating the Self in Earthly Gods by Jessica Nirvana Ram”

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...