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capittella's review
5.0
Just like in the previous Poetry issue—wonderfully guest-edited by Ashley M. Jones—the June 2021 magazine is a breath of fresh air, with the stats to prove it: again, the absolute majority of contributors (18/21 in this case) are appearing in Poetry for the first time. There is a conscious effort to expand what appears in the journal, and, as a consequence, what a poem can do.
My favorite three poems (as always, the ones that caught me off guard at every turn) are:
Tina Mozelle Braziel's "Drawl & Hum": how it surprises with its catalog of consciously raised tadpoles, as a pandemic parable... and how it "concludes" by bringing us closer to a wild readiness instead of personifying nature.
Susan Browne's "Still Doing It": over and over, how it has fun with its potential reader, starting with our expectations of what masks are for:
"...you start taking off,
The mask that saves you from death
By apnea but makes you look like a snorkeler
From dreamland or an escapee from a tear gas fight,
& I’m excited"
...I love what this poem is still doing—and immediately looked for more poems by Susan Browne (I loved pretty much loved all of the ones I could find online).
Cathy Linh Che's "Zombie Apocalypse Now: The Making Of": the metalanguage (a wild script) in this poem encroaching... and finally crashing into our reality level... a metalanguage that turns out not to be meta, the necessary artifice. It gave me the chills.
Also: the prose comment by Laura Kolbe, "On Naming and Counting" by itself would be worth the price tag. But there's so much more on this issue with its kaleidoscopic ways of looking—or starting to look—at our pandemic years.
Congrats & thank you again, Poetry team!
My favorite three poems (as always, the ones that caught me off guard at every turn) are:
Tina Mozelle Braziel's "Drawl & Hum": how it surprises with its catalog of consciously raised tadpoles, as a pandemic parable... and how it "concludes" by bringing us closer to a wild readiness instead of personifying nature.
Susan Browne's "Still Doing It": over and over, how it has fun with its potential reader, starting with our expectations of what masks are for:
"...you start taking off,
The mask that saves you from death
By apnea but makes you look like a snorkeler
From dreamland or an escapee from a tear gas fight,
& I’m excited"
...I love what this poem is still doing—and immediately looked for more poems by Susan Browne (I loved pretty much loved all of the ones I could find online).
Cathy Linh Che's "Zombie Apocalypse Now: The Making Of": the metalanguage (a wild script) in this poem encroaching... and finally crashing into our reality level... a metalanguage that turns out not to be meta, the necessary artifice. It gave me the chills.
Also: the prose comment by Laura Kolbe, "On Naming and Counting" by itself would be worth the price tag. But there's so much more on this issue with its kaleidoscopic ways of looking—or starting to look—at our pandemic years.
Congrats & thank you again, Poetry team!
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