Raleigh Review
501(c)(3) Nonprofit
EIN: 27-2644341
ISSN: 2169-3943
—Subscribe here!
Sample Book Reviews
Raleigh Review vol. 7, no. 1 (spring 2017), pp. 79-81.
MARTY SAUNDERS
Ideas of Story and Meaning: The Catalog of Broken Things
A. Molotkov. The Catalog of Broken Things. Portland, Oregon: Airlie Press, 2016. $16, paper.
The Catalog of Broken Things is a book of our moment. . . [read the entire review]
Raleigh Review vol. 7, no. 1 (spring 2017), pp. 82-85.
D. ERIC PARKISON
Full of Red Nectar: Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes
Cheryl Dumesnil. Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. $15.95, paper.
Cheryl Dumesnil’s new book contains poems that are strikingly bright and inviting. . . [read the entire review]
Raleigh Review vol. 7, no. 1 (spring 2017), pp. 86-92.
TIMOTHY MCBRIDE
The Nature of the Mirror: Life Pig
Alan Shapiro. Life Pig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. $18, paper.
To those who would find easy, sentimental consolations in a blinkered view of benevolent nature and its divinity-reflecting orderliness, Bertrand Russell had a pithy retort: “There’s a conspiracy of silence about the tapeworm.”
Alan Shapiro’s dark and marvelous new collection of poems—the jarringly titled Life Pig—constitutes a similar retort to those who accept easy consolations from art. . . [read the entire review]
Raleigh Review vol. 7, no. 1 (spring 2017), pp. 93-94.
ROB GREENE
No More Sunlight, No More Moonlight: Small Crimes
Andrea Jurjević. Small Crimes. Tallahassee, Florida: Anhinga Press, 2017. $20, paper.
Andrea Jurjević’s collection, Small Crimes, follows a young Croatian woman from a homeland entrenched
in war to a safer America. Flash forward from the Balkans of the 1990s to present day Aleppo and we find our
fellow humans once again in peril. When I read Jurjević’s collection, I wonder about the future prize winning collections that we may see from the survivors of the current day’s genocides. . . [read the entire review]
Raleigh Review vol. 6, no. 1 (spring 2016), pp. 83-85.
Marty Saunders
Rusted Charms: Rough Knowledge
Christine Poreba. Rough Knowledge. Tallahassee, Florida: Anhinga Press, 2016. $20, paper.
It is fitting that a poet who uses language to capture commonplace locales, true stories, and the lives of real people won the first book prize bearing the name of Philip Levine—a poet renowned for writing about the working class. . . [read the entire review]
Raleigh Review vol. 6, no. 1 (spring 2016), pp. 86-88.
Samuel Piccone
Rhythmic History: Doggerland: Ancestral Poems
Dicko King. Doggerland: Ancestral Poems. Somerville, Massachusetts: Off the Grid Press, 2015. $15, paper.
Reading Dicko King’s first poetry collection, Doggerland: Ancestral Poems, the first thing one notices is the deftness with which King explores time and place. The Ireland of this book is a place that constantly explores its own chronicled history, searching the primordial past for evidence of human evolution and the meaning of culture inherited. . . [read the entire review]
Raleigh Review vol. 6, no. 1 (spring 2016), pp. 89-91.
Will Justice Drake
Classical Made Colloquial: The Poems of Catullus
Jeannine Diddle Uzzi and Jeffrey Thomson (trans.). The Poems of Catullus: An Annotated Translation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015. $25, paper.
Prior to reading Uzzi and Thomson’s translation of Catullus’s “little book,” as he names it in his opening poem, I had experienced Catullus only in line-by-line literal translation. These two translators have produced a work both evocative and readable for the modern English speaker, resurrecting the spirit of Catullus in a modern body. . .
[read the entire review]