Boston Review's Spring Poetry Microreviews Are Plentiful

Spring Poetry Microreviews are in at Boston Review! Reviewers include William Waddell, Carrie Etter, Annie Bolotin, Gabrielle Flam, and Cassandra Cleghorn, who look at new books by Traci Brimhall, Camille T. Dungy, Jennifer Moxley, Laura Sims, and Michael Snediker, respectively. We'll take Bolotin's review of Moxley's Druthers (Flood Editions, 2018) for an excerpt-spin:

In one of the series of eponymous poems scattered throughout Jennifer Moxley’s ninth volume Druthers, Moxley asserts a poetics: “I would rather the poem’s score / My ear imprison, than enumerate / The wrongs of late capitalism.” The Latinate words and striking internal rhyme provide this type of imprisoning and enchanting sonic pleasure to her readers. While Moxley has long been known for her seemingly retrograde adherence to poetic form despite her radical politics, the poems in Druthers bravely hazard further in this direction. The seventeenth-century royalist poet Robert Herrick emerges as her key influence in this volume in part perhaps because of their shared interest in pleasure. “It’s best to start with desire,” counsels Moxley at the start of “The Honest Cook’s Insomnia”—a long poem that develops an extended metaphor comparing cooking to poetry—and continues, “You should be as attentive / to the palate of who you are / cooking for as lovers are to the whims of their beloved, so that / their desires become your pleasures.” If poetry is a social art form for Moxley, it is because of the interplay between reader and writer and the pleasures created in imagining that relationship...

Read 'em all at Boston Review.