Brilliant Women Inc

Snow Flowers, an under-20 page but solidly stapled and exquisitely-designed debut chapbook by previously unknown-to-me writer Ling Ge, is a perfect argument for the need for chapbooks in today's poetic landscape. As both tasters for the poet's longer collections (past or future) and encapsulations of a particular vision, sequence or nexus, the chapbooks emerging from Anstruther Press (only 10 bucks!) feel as solid in the hand and the mind as trade books, but with far greater portability. Ge's experimentations with sestina-style repetitions and Tang Dynasty forms, along with her precise haikus, ghazals and a pantoum offer a generous introduction to her tangible craft. A longer piece, "The Time Tunnel," presents a lunging syntax, featuring a "canola" landscape where "Red Guards" beat "goslings to death" and then the speaker, labelled "Capitalist" is eventually able to flee within the interstices of italicized questions concer...

It might come as little surprise that I adore lyric poetry, real lyrics grounded in actual experience that produce their own wild and accurate sonorities. I can usually sense a faker, a Mary Oliver-type poem that strains within its own imagery, desperate to produce a responsive "ooooo ahhhhh" in the reader, rather than one that flows organically with a depth of awareness of line breaks and assonantal bridges and an emotion that emerges from its origins, not one generated superficially via the placement of "feeling words" on the page.  All of Us Hidden is that kind of book, a deep winding through familial loss and environmental torment, indigenous awarenesses and parental yearnings. The poems surge in five parts, of which only the final one "Too Fast" felt like it could have been re-shaped and the remaining pieces inserted into the prior four sections. Streetly uses the simplest of diction (salmon, rock, spruce tree) but interweaves these pure signifiers w...