Review of Telling My Father by James Crews

Posted on February 20, 2018

Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2017 $15 (paper) Reviewed by Grunge [James Crews is a contributing editor to this magazine–Editor] The sober, plain-spoken, gently ironic, and good-humored voice in James Crews’s second full-length collection, Telling My Father, confirms the promise evident in the poet’s first collection, The Book of What Stays. These new poems demonstrate […]


Review of THE DIRT RIDDLES by Michael Walsh

Posted on October 22, 2012

University of Arkansas Press, 2010  $16.00 reviewed by James Crews In the glut of poetry books being published these days, it’s easy for collections like Michael Walsh’s The Dirt Riddles to get lost in the shuffle. Perhaps it’s also easy in our current literary climate for poets who choose to write accessibly about the natural […]


Review of Paradise, Indiana by Bruce Snider

Posted on May 27, 2012

Pleiades Press, 2012 Softcover, $16.95 Reviewed by James Crews I highly recommend getting a hold of Bruce Snider’s latest collection of poems, Paradise, Indiana and reading it back-to-back with his first book, the Felix Pollak Prize-winning The Year We Studied Women, published in 2003 by the University of Wisconsin Press. These two volumes are not […]


Is Poetry Gay?

Posted on March 14, 2012

by James Crews On a flight from San Francisco to Chicago a few years ago, I happened to be reading a book of poetry—Charles Wright’s Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems. I was absorbed, but the woman next to me—maybe bored by her own copy of The Da Vinci Code—felt compelled to strike up a conversation […]