"The Poetry Review 113:4 (winter 2023)"

Of the 144 pages there are 10 pages of illustrations (each using a quarter of a page on average) with the odd sentence by Anne Carson, 40 pages of reviews, and 30 pages of discussion. There are about 55 pages of poetry, 2 of them showing a poem in the form of a flow-chart.

Wayne Holloway-Smith’s editorial includes “grief has had a way of confiscating any grand narrative of self I had cultivated, and big ideas, bringing me down instead to a more profound level of humanness, or providing a type of lens through which, as I look around, I see others who are in naked pain and I see that they see me”, which sounds promising, but elsewhere there's some lit-crit lingo, especially in the joint-author pieces. On p.105 there’s “Susannah Dickey on linguistic challenges to systems, forms, and consciousness” which begins with “How do ‘limits’ enact themselves upon a poem?”. "enact themselves upon"?

I started with low expectations. I found that liked “Girling on behalf of a simultaneous girl body” (Esfandiari-Denney). “Etude No. 5” by Rowan Ricardo Phillips was interesting – many repeated lines, the final stanza with 12 copies of “Any minute”. I didn’t get Aracelis Girmay’s pieces. I liked Victoria Chang’s poems. I didn’t like Stella Wong’s pieces though she’s a graduate of Harvard, Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Columbia with poems in Poetry, APR etc. I didn’t get Rachael Allen (Faber). The dialogues (13 pages and 17 pages both include interesting points but are far too flabby – chit-chat and mutual backslapping are all very well, but space is at a premium. One of the reviews is a dialogue.

So in the end I was pleasantly surprised - this is poetry which can’t be mistaken for prose. There's frequent lack of continuity (register changes, interjection by statements, etc). I think poetry like this needs to be good of its type to work – if it's half good it's bad. And many of these poems seemed good to me, having many striking lines. It's the lines inbetween that concern me. In more mainstream pieces these might info-dump, or be like plain mountings for a jewel. Here they sometimes come from a different register, or are puzzling to me. I guess it's possible for there to be a reciprocal relationship between lines, a good line being a mounting for another good line.

The final review piece (3 books under review) starts with "Continuing our exploration into joint reviews" and is in the form of a conversion. Within 6 lines one reviewer writes "it could easily have become gimmicky ... it could just be an effect. It could easily be trivial". Then later they write "In another poet's hands, we might say 'OK, that was a cliché, that needs to be edited out". Near the end a reviewer writes "I could listen to you talk all day!". The review quotes a section from Sealey's "The Feguson Report" which I like - "Then the birds began to fly/ low and patternless,/ as if they were each two/ hands joined, just pretending/ at birds - the soft music/ from passing cars shouting/ down the soft music of their dying./ Stop! Hands where I can see!/ a boy pretends to prey. His mark/ makes of her hands a bird/ and flies away. Stop, or I'll/ shoot! he kids. Then makes/ of his hands a gun. Fires away." (In 2014, an 18-‐year old unarmed African American man, was fatally shot by a white Police Officer in Ferguson)