On Scott Edward Anderson’s Fallow Field

On Scott Edward Anderson’s Fallow Field

Posted on March 2, 2017

Aldrich Press, 2013 Reviewed by Christopher Cadra   When I read the poems of Scott Edward Anderson’s Fallow Field, I envision a Romantic poet standing on the bridge between William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg. If that sounds odd, let me explain. A Romantic influence reveals itself as the pulse of Anderson’s Fallow Field. But American […]


Review of Winterkill by Todd Davis

Review of Winterkill by Todd Davis

Posted on July 10, 2016

Michigan State University Press, 2016. $19.95 (paper) By James Crews The late poet and novelist, Jim Harrison (1937-2016) once said: “Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak, if you could teach your soul to speak.” He might easily have been talking about Todd Davis, whose latest collections, In the Kingdom of […]


Review of The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield

Review of The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield

Posted on April 20, 2016

Knopf, 2015 $19.94 (hardback) by James Crews There is some new and dazzling force at work in The Beauty, Jane Hirshfield’s latest and much-anticipated collection of poetry. Yet I must admit, I didn’t entirely appreciate the rawness and unpredictability of these poems at first. I have been a fan of Hirshfield’s for well over a […]


Review of Practicing the Truth by Ellery Akers

Review of Practicing the Truth by Ellery Akers

Posted on October 31, 2015

Autumn House Press, 2015. by James Crews I was astounded and carried away over and over by the poems in Ellery Akers’ second collection, Practicing the Truth. Winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize selected by Alicia Ostriker, this book offers glimpses of a difficult, haunting past that the poet has somehow come to terms […]


Review of Leaving the Pink House by Ladette Randolph

Review of Leaving the Pink House by Ladette Randolph

Posted on July 28, 2015

University of Iowa Press, 2015. by James Crews As I was flipping through cable channels recently, I couldn’t help but notice the abundance of shows about homes and home improvement—Property Brothers, Rehab Addict, House Hunters, Love It or List It—and the list goes on. Perhaps few other countries in the world are as obsessed with […]


Review of The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book by Ted Kooser

Review of The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book by Ted Kooser

Posted on November 6, 2014

University of Nebraska Press, 2014 by James Crews A book of hours was a daily devotional text popular with Christians in the Middle Ages. Each manuscript was written in the vernacular of the period and listed the appropriate prayers for specific times of the day, days of the week and months of the year, making […]


Review of Caribou by Charles Wright

Review of Caribou by Charles Wright

Posted on November 6, 2014

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014 by James Crews On a long flight years ago, the woman next to me kept interrupting my reading of Charles Wright’s Negative Blue: New and Selected Poems (2001) to make polite small talk. Eventually, she came to the inevitable question: “What do you do?” When I confessed I was a […]


Review of Darkened Rooms of Summer by Jared Carter

Review of Darkened Rooms of Summer by Jared Carter

Posted on April 23, 2014

University of Nebraska Press, 2014   $18.95 paper by James Crews The spherical stones were everywhere on the Oregon beach where we were walking. When I asked my scientist-friend what they were, she explained that they’re called concretions, and they form when a lump of cement lodges in sedimentary strata that has already been deposited, […]


Four Recent Chapbooks

Four Recent Chapbooks

Posted on June 25, 2013

The Laughing Game by Marianne Kunkel Finishing Line Press, 2012 $14 paper the lake has no saint by Stacey Waite Tupelo Press, 2010 $9.95 paper The Edge of Damage by Heather Swan Parallel Press, 2009 $12 paper My Life as an Island by Travis Mossotti Moon City Press, 2013 $7.95 paper Reviewed by James Crews […]


Review of Incarnadine by Mary Szybist

Review of Incarnadine by Mary Szybist

Posted on June 25, 2013

Graywolf Press, 2013 $10 paper By James Crews It’s been ten years since Mary Szybist’s first collection, Granted (2003), was published to much acclaim, and lucky for us, Szybist did not rush her next book of poems. Reading through her second collection, Incarnadine, published by Graywolf Press earlier this year, one gets the sense that […]