This review is no slender paperback; Big River Poetry Review Volume 1 is a blockbuster 9 x 12 coffee table book with 185 pages of poems. "A magnificent read," says Joan Colby. THIS IS AS GOOD AS IT GETS. Including poems by Pam Uschuk, Phillip Fried, Joan Colby, William Doreski, Sheila E. Murphy, Peycho Kanev, Sybill Pittman Estess, Larry Thomas, Robert Lietz, Martin Willitts, Jr., and many other outstanding poets, this is the first print issue of Big River Poetry Review, an on-line and print journal of fine original contemporary poetry compiled, edited, and published in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, see bigriverpoetry.com. In this issue, we are printing all the poems we published on-line between the Review's inception in late May 2012 and the end of December 2012.
The forty-eight poems in Sky Sandwiches echo John F. Buckley’s wry, paradoxical perspective, a point of view evoking both the transcendent and the quotidian, fusing a sky associated with religion and higher yearnings with the sandwiches of simpler sustenance. In his poems as in this world, people fly like crooked arrows, seeking targets both above and below. The collection describes how our desires lead us to absurd hopes and stale resignations, humble dreams and sublime despairs. It recounts the ways we may seek both eternal salvation and a half-decent Italian sub. Parts are tender. Parts are funny. Parts will get stuck in your braces.
For years now, I have marveled at the energy in Carolynn Kingyens' poems. Been in awe of their immediacy. These two enviable traits are on full display in her collection, Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound. This book is unflinching and unabashedly honest. There is nothing false here. She holds her readers close and shows us all that is intimate and sacred. The details and emotions housed in these poems so uniquely belong to Carolynn, and because of their vividness and humanity, they also belong to anybody who is lucky enough to read this book. I highly recommend this seismic and stunning debut. -Corey D. Cook, author of The Weight of Shadows (Finishing Line Press) We can be happily married and love our kids and still feel the devastation of the heart. That, Carolynn Kingyens reminds us, is the human feeling. These restless lyric poems probe for the sacred among the diseases and anxieties and cats and broken bones and cracked bowls of Brooklyn. Kingyens tells everything. She leaves nothing out, and finds, over and over, gold. As, in her grandmother's bathroom, when she first touched a crucifix: "nailed to the floral pattern wall, / above the light switch- / Christ's eyes forever cast down, / staring at ... little jars of beauty cream, / and an old photo of her only son, / my father ..." This is a ferociously honest, compassionate book -John Wall Barger, author of The Mean Game Carolynn Kingyens' poetry addresses the passage from innocence to experience, the effects of time, already implicit in our beings-even before the big bang makes a sound: life a series of betrayals and losses. A sense of sin and salvation overhangs this, though these are not "religious" poems at all. As she writes in "The Attic," "It's years later" when she encounters a photograph of herself as a girl in "her pre-baby body," that unsullied person "who is unaware of all the kneeling to come." Often set in the chaos and tumult of New York City, these poems show us a woman navigating the rough seas that confront us all. -Charles Rammelkamp, author Me and Sal Paradise and Mortal Coil
Winner of the Herder Prize, Nichita Stanescu was one of Romania’s most celebrated contemporary poets. This dazzling collection of poems – the most extensive collection of his work to date – reveals a world in which heavenly and mysterious forces converse with the everyday and earthbound, where love and a quest for truth are central, and urgent questions flow. His startling images stretch the boundaries of thought. His poems, at once surreal and corporeal, lead us into new metaphysical and linguistic terrain.
After many years of publishing journalistic and scholarly articles, Gert Niers decided to break away from this format and to apply to his writing a more personal style suitable for autobiography and memoirs. Arrived at Last is the story of his life in Germany after World War Two and then in America, the country of his choice. He tells his autobiography in an uncomplicated, colloquial fashion the way one would talk perhaps at a bar table surrounded by friends. This approach allows him to comment on many experiences and aspects of life. He also reminisces about his excursions into France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and later on about the many people he met in the German and German-Jewish community of New York City. Everything is seen from a very personal perspective, confession-style. Still the author has rendered historical facts as precisely and correctly as it was possible to him. His descriptions and conclusions are those of an experienced observer. His book is a contribution to minority and immigrant literature, but also a cultural commentary about life in Europe and the U.S.
The poems in CL Bledsoe's fifth collection are at turns funny and tragic, self-deprecating and deeply personal, as readers have come to expect from the author of the autobiographical collection Riceland. In Trashcans In Love, Bledsoe continues to write about the Arkansas Delta of his youth, where "we were...all looking for a place/to stick our hearts for safe-keeping" while "the boarded-over windows/of our mothers' eyes watched from graves half dug/but not full yet." Ultimately, "we aren't looking/ for tomorrow, only an eternal today."
For any of us, what stays? For the arsonist's wife who has not yet left? The devout saint trudging another mile in his nail-shoes? The lost couple in their dying moments in a Nebraska blizzard? The old woman who refuses to leave her home in Chernobyl? With an unflinching eye, James Crews gives us the forbidden love, forbidden unions, and secret lives that, whatever the loss, the attrition, the cost, we must acknowledge, must hold, must keep. And here, in Crews's finely wrought, deeply felt poems, is their testimony.
A classic anthology of Minnesota literature, with selections from novels, short stories, essays, and memoirs, that conveys the diversity of the Minnesota Experience.
