June Poem Reviews

I've had fiction and non-fiction reviews published in quite a few journals and have been a member of the National Book Critics Circle, when I could afford it. Therefore, I feel quasi-professional in those arenas. I don't necessarily feel that way about my poetry reviews. I have opinions, though, and in the interest of keeping my poetry-mind occupied during an otherwise stressful time in my life, I'd like to make you, the poetry world, an offer. If you mail me your chapbook or book--at least 24 pages but no more than 100 pages, self-published or traditional--I will post a review of between 150 and 300 words about it, as professionally as I can, in the following months. Promise. Mail me your book, get a review. Easy. If I get a huge response, I'll declare a cap and communicate it here. I would prefer to work from print copies. I hate reading poetry in PDF or MOBI--my preferred methods for prose--because the lines never break correctly and I find myself critiquing lineation that doesn't exist in the original.

Sound good? Email me for the mailing address, livenudepoems AT gmail DOT com. Ask questions in the comments. Offer good until postmark date 7/1 or I cry uncle.

Comments

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disa...

Weldon Kees

Along with my Jack Gilbert kick, I've been reading the poems of Weldon Kees as well as the secondary material (very little of which seems to be available in book form), which is too bad. There's a pretty good book called Weldon Kees and the Mid-Century Generation: Letters from 1935 to 1955 , which is structured in such a way that it seems more like a biography in letters. Normally, a writer's letters are collected and footnotes are rare except to sometimes identify confusing timelines. Robert Knoll includes more narrative about Kees than it does letters. I think otherwise it might not have made a full book, otherwise.Very interesting anyway. Kees seemed poised for mainstream uber-success at 41 years old when he simply disappeared. His car, with the keys still in it, was found near the Golden Gate bridge, but with no trace of whether he committed suicide or simply ran off to Mexico, as he talked of frequently in his last years. James Reidel's book Vanished Act: t...

Charlie Brice

Immortality You make sure to eat Grape-Nuts every third or fourth morning, cover those non-nut nuts with blueberries because they have gobs of Omegas and no Theta’s, floss every other night to inhibit heart infections, use mouthwash several times-a-day to ward-off armies of oral bacteria, walk the dog every night for a mile, eat an orange daily, take your Lipitor horse pill, your Enalapril, Verapamil, Singulair, Multi- vitamin, Allegra, and carefully cut your Metoprolol in half and take it for your arrythmias, and you do all this instead of church, instead of fingering rosary beads and telling yourself that somewhere near our galaxy’s big black hole Jesus and Mary are floating around without oxygen masks or spacesuits, and it’s in this way that you avoid the anvil of disease, the miasma of malaise, the numinosity of pneumonia—in this way you make sure never to die, you make sure to live forever and ever. Amen. Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry ...

Live Nude Poems

Search This Blog