Book Reviews | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
TELLING YOU WHAT TO THINK SINCE 2003 | IMAGE: NOAH SATERSTROM
Book Reviews | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
TELLING YOU WHAT TO THINK SINCE 2003 | IMAGE: NOAH SATERSTROM
Sade Murphy’s “Dream Machine” reviewed by Jeffrey Hecker
"Crowd-surfs the absurd, disturbs the sleeping, pinches the conscious on both cheeks Dutch-Colonial style, frightens the tranquil, and stimulates arm-stub nerve-endings like Johns Hopkins researchers attempting to help frustrated amputees."--Jeffrey Hecker on Sade Murphy's *Dream Machine* (co-im-press, 2014)
Justin Limoli’s “Bloodletting in Minor Scales [A Canvas in Arms]” reviewed by M. Forajter
"This is what poetry is. Justin is better than you. Bloodletting does everything you are afraid to do. It kicks poetic convention to the curb because in the face of real suffering, none of our rules matter. Even the everyday shape of a poem cannot live up to pain. The poem repeats. The poem spills over. The poem becomes a play." — M. Forajter on Justin Limoli's Bloodletting in Minor Scales [A Canvas in Arms] (Plays Inverse 2014)
Laura Ellen Joyce’s “The Luminol Reels” reviewed by Elizabeth Mikesch
"To read this book is to be induced to squat above a sororal cistern in a hiked-up dress. Authoritative, excessive, and grotesque, Joyce destabilizes that trend where people write saccharine shit in technical language, which is something some writers do to endear themselves to readers when they have pissants for feelings" -- Elizabeth Mikesch on The Luminol Reels by Laura Ellen Joyce (Calamari Ink 2014)
Cody-Rose Clevidence’s “Beast Feast” reviewed By John Findura
"Few books evoke place as much as this one evokes the entirety of the natural world. Reading it makes you smell the moss and hear the sucking mud precisely because it is difficult and scattered." -- John Findura on Beast Feast by Cody-Rose Clevidence (Ahsahta Press 2014)
Laura Sims’s “My god is this a man” reviewed by Lara Mimosa Montes
The poems in Laura Sims's My god is this a man navigate "a dark place in their attempts to speak about the unspeakable" -- Lara Mimosa Montes on Laura Sims's My god is this a man (Fence Books 2014)
Fox Frazier-Foley Reviews Jessica Piazza’s “Interrobang”
...a formal and metaphysical engagement with questions of what can and cannot be contained. Titled after a piece of punctuation that signifies both exclamation and interrogation, the book is unsurprisingly obsessed with dualities: its sonnets follow an almost binary pattern as they vacillate between pathological extremes of love and fear. Each poem is titled after a clinical phobia or philia, and accordingly celebrates and/or laments the implied emotional parameters of such terrors.
Sade Murphy’s “Dream Machine” reviewed by Jeffrey Hecker
"Crowd-surfs the absurd, disturbs the sleeping, pinches the conscious on both cheeks Dutch-Colonial style, frightens the tranquil, and stimulates arm-stub nerve-endings like Johns Hopkins researchers attempting to help frustrated amputees."--Jeffrey Hecker on Sade Murphy's *Dream Machine* (co-im-press, 2014)
Justin Limoli’s “Bloodletting in Minor Scales [A Canvas in Arms]” reviewed by M. Forajter
"This is what poetry is. Justin is better than you. Bloodletting does everything you are afraid to do. It kicks poetic convention to the curb because in the face of real suffering, none of our rules matter. Even the everyday shape of a poem cannot live up to pain. The poem repeats. The poem spills over. The poem becomes a play." — M. Forajter on Justin Limoli's Bloodletting in Minor Scales [A Canvas in Arms] (Plays Inverse 2014)
Laura Ellen Joyce’s “The Luminol Reels” reviewed by Elizabeth Mikesch
"To read this book is to be induced to squat above a sororal cistern in a hiked-up dress. Authoritative, excessive, and grotesque, Joyce destabilizes that trend where people write saccharine shit in technical language, which is something some writers do to endear themselves to readers when they have pissants for feelings" -- Elizabeth Mikesch on The Luminol Reels by Laura Ellen Joyce (Calamari Ink 2014)
Cody-Rose Clevidence’s “Beast Feast” reviewed By John Findura
"Few books evoke place as much as this one evokes the entirety of the natural world. Reading it makes you smell the moss and hear the sucking mud precisely because it is difficult and scattered." -- John Findura on Beast Feast by Cody-Rose Clevidence (Ahsahta Press 2014)
Laura Sims’s “My god is this a man” reviewed by Lara Mimosa Montes
The poems in Laura Sims's My god is this a man navigate "a dark place in their attempts to speak about the unspeakable" -- Lara Mimosa Montes on Laura Sims's My god is this a man (Fence Books 2014)
Fox Frazier-Foley Reviews Jessica Piazza’s “Interrobang”
...a formal and metaphysical engagement with questions of what can and cannot be contained. Titled after a piece of punctuation that signifies both exclamation and interrogation, the book is unsurprisingly obsessed with dualities: its sonnets follow an almost binary pattern as they vacillate between pathological extremes of love and fear. Each poem is titled after a clinical phobia or philia, and accordingly celebrates and/or laments the implied emotional parameters of such terrors.