James Brasfield
Cove: Poems
Louisiana State University Press, 2023 $17.95
Playlist:
“By exploring the translation of the sensory world into art, Brasfield faces the passage of time and the transitory nature of experience, thought, and memory. The poems find ‘angles of vision' to rescue a present instant in its essential fluidity, to go deep enough, without distraction, into the moment and reveal touchstones of being. Throughout Cove, Brasfield embraces the enduring effort to create an experience of language that is rich, lasting, and true, as life speeds into and through the future."
Poems read:
“Etruscans at Monterchi”
“Amalgam”
“Winter Precipice”
“Founding Cities”
“The Ritual”
former DMQ Review contributor
Mara Adamitz Scrupe
REAP: a Flora
Shipwreckt Publishing, 2023
$18.95
Playlist:
The poems in REAP straddle the global and the personal, emerging from research in the natural sciences, social histories, geology, biology, and horticulture, alongside the poet's fascination with remnants of material culture. An avocational naturalist Adamitz Scrupe utilizes her considerable experiences identifying, documenting, and drawing indigenous wildflowers to ground the collection: from birth references in the first section, to allusions of inevitable decay in the last grouping of poems, REAP expresses the poets’ devotion to the study of nature as a locus for human ecology, underpinning intimate linkages between people, plants and animals, and the interdependencies of all species.
Tracy Youngblom
Boy
CavanKerry Press, 2023
$18
Playlist:
The death of a youngest sibling as a child, an alcoholic and distant father, a grief-stricken family, a tentative faith: these are the building blocks of the narrative of Boy, a sequence of poems that explores how death and loss color memory and influence the ways family members relate to each other and to their shared history.
former DMQ Review contributor