Reviews

Follow the links to read some of my published reviews:

Diane Lockward. Eve’s Red Dress. (Nicholasville, Kentucky, Wind Publications, 2003)

The poems in Eve’s Red Dress are about “Losing the Blues.” Like any honky-tonk girl on a Saturday night, Eve slips into her red satin dress, “pull[s] up to a neon / martini glass, order[s] a shot of tequila�I’ll never be royal for you again,” she declares.

Read the rest at Smartish Pace

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Elaine Fowler Palencia. The Dailiness of It. Louisville: Grex Press, 2002. Soft, 37 pages,
ISBN 0-9722113-0-6. $9.50

The bright anger in Elaine Palencia’s poems burns away all sentimentality, all religiosity, and leaves us with the awful holy love of a mother for a son with severe neurological deficits. In Taking the Train, we met the son as a child in body and mind. In The Dailiness of It, he is twenty-something, a child in mind still but also “A man sitting in our den/Watching television/Unshaven/Thick neck/Mounded gut…” (“Missing”).

Read the rest at this link.

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Steven R. Cope. Clover�s Log Wind Publications, 2004 97 pp., $14.00

Steven R. Cope is a latter day troubadour singing the matter of Kentucky. He has published a novel, a book of fables, four collections of poetry, and a book of children�s verse. He is also a singer/songwriter/album producer, signed with BMI, who gives guitar lessons.

The troubadours invented Romance, defined chivalry, and gave us the legends of King Arthur. Cope is as romantic as his medieval predecessors, but his knight errant is a slippery Kentucky mountain creature named Clover.

Read the rest at this link.

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Charlie Hughes. Shifting for Myself. Nicholasville, Ky.: Wind Publications, 2002. 103 pgs. $12.00. ISBN 1-893239-14-4

Farm boys are on nodding terms with death. In the long central section of Shifting for Myself, Charlie Hughes deals with the constant of death in pastoral Kentucky in the 50s and 60s. The stillborn twin lamb is heroically resuscitated only to be rejected by the mother and condemned to death in the “frozen darkness” (�Golden in the Mercy of his Means�); the bookish farm boy is crushed under the wheels of a hay wagon (�Ode to a Slugger�).

Read the rest at this link.

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Charlie Hughes. Body and Blood. Nicholasville, Ky.: Wind Publications, 2010. 83 pgs. $15.00. ISBN 1936138158

In his inscription to my copy of his new poetry collection, Body and Blood (Wind 2010), Charlie Hughes wrote “I hope you enjoy these poems from where I’m from.”

It is an apt statement because, indeed, I did enjoy the poems and because these poems are from a particular place and time. Charlie Hughes is a poet grounded in the physical, the feel, sound, taste of tools and crops, creeks and rivers of rural Kentucky. Here you will find Fords and Farmalls, John Deeres and International Harvesters, Studebaker pickup trucks (my grandfather had one), log chains and wringer washers. You will also find baseballs and cane poles, sparrows and turkey buzzards, cows up to their bellies in pond water on hot summer days.

Read the rest at this link.

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Ann Fisher-Wirth. The Trinket Poems. Wind, 2003. ISBN: 0-9741268-1-0

An aging woman named Trinket, tawdry and disposable as a string of Mardi Gras beads, stigmatized by mastectomy, and in search of Christ as Dionysius on the fevered New Orleans streets of a Tennessee Williams play. A 21st century actor, professor, poet, middle aged and middle class, in search of Apollo on a campus stage in Oxford, Mississippi. Ann Fisher-Wirth brings these two women together in The Trinket Poems, the story of a production of Williams� one-act play, The Mutilated.

Read the rest at Pulse

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Christine Stewart-Nuñez. Unbound & Branded. Georgetown, Kentucky: Finishing Line Press, 2006

Ironies abound in Christine Stewart-Nu�ez’s Unbound & Branded, a chapbook of ekphrastic formal poems considering Kate Moss as an icon of the female form. Based on a 40-page portfolio of Moss portraits in W magazine in 2003, the collection is as filled with parodies, sly winks, and in-jokes as are the paintings and photographs from which they are written.

Read the rest at Rattle

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Other reviews, both mine and others’, can be found as blog posts by searching on the category “Reviews.”