Review of Touch by Henri Cole

Farrar, Straus, Giroux 2011 Hardcover, $23 by James Crews Henri Cole’s Touch is a dark but redemptive book. These poems—many of them sonnets—strike an elegiac, confessional tone as Cole reconstructs his personal history through memory, dreams and observations of the ordinary in the natural world. Touch builds upon the mastery already in full display in […]

Review of Forms and Hollows by Heather Dubrow

Cherry Grove Collections, 2011 Softcover $15 Reviewed by James Crews Heather Dubrow’s first collection of poetry, Forms and Hollows, opens with an extended elegy for her mother and makes use of a dizzying range of poetic forms—everything from sonnets and villanelles to a canzone and ghazal. These are some of the forms, of course, indicated […]

Review of On Speaking Terms by Connie Wanek

Copper Canyon Press, 2010 Softcover, $15.00 Reviewed by James Crews Every once in a while a book of poetry will fall into your hands and—perhaps not expecting much at first—you read it in one sitting, breathing a sigh of relief that you have discovered a new poet (new to you, at least) whose work actually […]