Kent Shaw

Kent's review of The Nick of Time 5/5: The relationship between irony and wonder often feels uneven to me. Irony is so tall, incisive, and imposing on a sentence or a poem. Yes, I appreciate what irony can bring to a moment. But often...

"The relationship between irony and wonder often feels uneven to me. Irony is so tall, incisive, and imposing on a sentence or a poem"

from my goodreads review of Rosmarie Waldrop's The Nick of Time
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Kent's review of Repose 5/5: How is the self formed? And should this self-actualization be staged as a form-ing process or a formationed reality? These, to me, are the underlying questions of Amelia Zhou’s book. Like how poe...

"In Zhou’s book, the triangulation is more sustained. Which allows for especially evocative commentary on who she perceives herself to be, and who she is now after the different pressures that come with adulthood."

from my goodreads review of Amelia Zhou's Repose
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Kent's review of We Sailed on the Lake 5/5: There is a shape to the poetic impressions in Bill Carty’s We Sailed on the Lake. A shape like a lake, I suppose. If you think of “shape” as what a lake looks like when you’re watching the mist h...

"In here, doing-ness revolves mainly around the temporality or shapeliness of an impression. What it takes to experience a moment, while many other moments inflect upon your experience of that moment."

from my goodreads review of Bill Carty's We Sailed on the Lake
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

If you like clowns of all sorts, Sreshtha Sen's poem, "Exceprt from Crown Clown[ed]" (originally in Action, Spectacle) is for you. I was definitely feeling it, so I wrote a close read.

thekalliope.org/excerpt-from...

"One of the challenges to life is knowing how to treat the mundane like it’s meaningless. Which is why I would say Ashbery is resigned to letting LOTS just be his life."

from my book review of John Ashbery's Can You Hear, Bird
thekalliope.org/lets-expansi...

Kent's review of An Authentic Life 5/5: What I have often admired in Chang’s work is this central lyric concern. Or a fountain of lyric thinking that starts, say, with a juxtaposition between “ocean” and “anonymity.” That generates a l...

"Is the poet's childhood authentic in the way she has learned authenticity from outside sources? From friends or even acquaintances she remembers meeting once, which she describes in “A Lunch Date.”"

from my goodreads review of Jennifer Chang's An Authentic Life
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Kent's review of Crane 5/5: The argument for poetry or lyric sensibility can require many words, sometimes arranged so the wording feels less like words, or maybe it feels more like words. Poetry can be wordy. Lyric prose c...

"Bolsover’s book is like the sharp inquisitive stance Anne Carson maintains about Greek mythology, but lay that inquisition on this bed of striking red petals.

from my goodreads review of Tessa Bolsover's Crane
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Kent's review of obscenity for the advancement of poetry 4/5: There will always be a struggle and a contradiction when you’re trying to understand a self, especially your own self. Because while you might center on what makes yourself a self viewing itself,...

"With pringle, though, it’s the membrane between self and outside the self. The social pressures that come when an individual thinks, I might be belonging to a ‘we’ right now.”

from my goodreads review of kathryn l. pringle's Obscenity for the Advancement of Poetry
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Kent's review of Skin Memory 4/5: There’s a structure to the present. Or there’s a significance felt in the present moment that can feel like poetry, and for John Sibley Williams’s book, feeling poetry implies there is a poetic s...

"The book is concerned with darkness, coupled with the perspective clouded by how familiar the poet is with this darkness."

from my goodreads review of John Sibley Williams's Skin Memory
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Kent's review of The Employees 4/5: Books with subjects and definite intentions on saying something about the subject can be difficult for me to read. Like On Walden Pond Henry David Thoreau: Walden Henry Thoreau, difficult to read...

"I am bought in to the book’s overarching concept, its keen interest in cybernetics and AI. Its inquiry into human experience. How much of being human involves occupying the natural world?"

from my goodreads review of Olga Ravn's The Employees
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Kent's review of Xanax Cowboy 5/5: Hannah Green is such a poser. Or Xanax Cowboy is. Or the “Hannah Green” who’s made this character to explain her life as a young adult. Whatever term you think fits when a poet invents a persona,...

"Xanax Cowboy is as much an extended monologue of mistaken identity as they are a WTF is this identity I’m being mistaken for. And, yes, there is outrage compelling the poems forward."

from my goodreads review of Hannah Green's Xanax Cowboy
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

I think T. S. Eliot's "First Voice" vs "Second Voice" can provide an interesting angle for reading Rodney Gomez's poem, "Genealogy" (found originally at The Boiler). Or that's what I'm talking about here:

thekalliope.org/genealogy-by...

Kent's review of Liontaming in America 5/5: After reading Willis’s book, I’m personally convinced an official start to human history can be located by those who are persistent enough. Everyone knows what it is. Just look behind you, like a...

"Willis’s book privileges the frayed edges of historical record. It's like visiting an archive, and you’ve been sifting through materials for the whole day, and now it’s everywhere on the table."

from my goodreads review of Elizabeth Willis's Liontaming in America
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

I feel like I also could have said Abigail Chabitnoy's "Hawking Rabbit Feet in the Age of Disbelief" uses an organic form to uncover its argument. I said this instead.

thekalliope.org/hawking-rabb...

Kent's review of April Galleons 5/5: There’s a wisdom to knowing how much of the world around you might be available to you, and how much more of it will merely exist. Trees in blossom. Your uncertainty which of the days it will be ...

"Let’s face it, Ashbery is the most there poet there is. The poetics of suddenly realizing, but burying all that sudden realization in rhetoric so that it’s not all the time clear there was a there there."

from my goodreads review of John Ashbery's April Galleons
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

What I really enjoy about Stefania Gomez's poem "Wreck" is its occupation of a between. It can be silly. It can be somber. And it's the occupation between those I'm trying to write about on my blog.

thekalliope.org/wreck-by-ste...

Sorrow, Framed: A book review for Emily Lee Luan's Return - theKalliope I have an initial review of Emily Lee Luan’s Return at goodreads. But I’ve thought to further elaborate on it after my close reading of the book’s final poem, “From weeping into weeping.” Emily Lee Lu...

I'd like to think this is a fair, critical reading of Emily Lee Luan's book, Return. And what I mean by critical is I register my delight that the book accomplishes its ambition.

thekalliope.org/sorrow-frame...

Kent's review of Paris Spleen 5/5: What is a city? Which seems like a sensible question. But it’s not. Because there are ways a city is what people want to find in a city. In many of Baudelaire’s prose poems, he alludes to the spe...

"A city can serve an individual’s ennui, and within that flat affect can exist the urge to say something new, to notice someone who would have gone overlooked, or to stir a fantasy."

from my goodreads review of Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Hi yes the coda of my book touches upon this as well as like three articles I have recently written about the inefficiency of humanistic study!! I will be annoying about this forever probably!

Submissions OPEN for the Wisconsin Poetry Series @uwiscpress.bsky.social ! Daniel Borzutzky is this year's judge for the Wisconsin Translation Prize! Airea D. Matthews for the Brittingham and Pollak Prize. Finalists are also chosen for publication! wicw.submittable.com/submit

Kent's review of All the Garbage of the World, Unite! 5/5: Something happened here. Something got stuck in a hole. Something sick. Like how garbage is sick. Like some people might talk about having baggage from previous relationships, and it feels like a...

"Because so much of this book smells. Like if you’re going to read it, prepare to be nauseous. Prepare to laugh at how the world is."

from my goodreads review of Kim Hyesoon's All the Garbage of the World, Unite!
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Reading Emily Lee Luan's "From weeping into weeping," I realize how impressionable I am. It's like I want to give in to as many readings as I think the poem suggests.

I talk about that in this blog post:
thekalliope.org/from-weeping...

Kent's review of It Is If I Speak 4/5: It’s hard for me not to read this in the context of the year 2000. The year Wenderoth had published Letters to Wendy’s with Verse Press. A book that got a lot of attention, and, I would argue, co...

"I read the book like I’m reading the B-sides of Letters to Wendy’s. And to be specific, the B-sides of Dead Letter Office to Document that happened with REM over the Amnesiac to Kid A of Radiohead."

from my goodreads review of Joe Wenderoth's It Is If I Speak
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Kent's review of Cold Dogs 4/5: Zan de Parry is invested in whatever teaching moment poetry is capable of. Like a poem could be a poem with a rose or it could be a rose-colored poem, and de Parry is going to lead you to drink a...

"Think of how every rose has its thorns, think of each thorn as a dimension, then think of de Parry’s imagination tangling the thorniness into a network of situations."

from my goodreads review of Zan de Parry's Cold Dogs
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

A Movie's Affect: A book review of Alisha Dietzman's Sweet Movie - theKalliope A book review for Alisha Dietzman's Sweet Movie (Beacon, 2023)

I posted a book review for @agdietzman.bsky.social's Sweet Movie.

thekalliope.org/a-movies-aff...

"Like a long sentence provides mimetic access to the poet’s personal comfort, a personal quiet, and then what he might do with all that."

I probably don't understand Ron Silliman's "Quietism." But in close reading Jeff Stonic's poem, "oscillating," I attempt to some.
thekalliope.org/oscillating-...

Kent's review of Apology for Want 5/5: Reading this book, I’m reminded that Mary Jo Bang was a photographer before publishing this book. It’s something in my Bang readings that I wish I would have realized earlier. Because it speaks m...

"I would argue the speaker in Apology for Want is like a version of Elizabeth Bishop preparing the way for Mary Jo Bang’s Louise, who appears in her second book, Louise in Love."

from my goodreads review of Mary Jo Bang's Apology for Want
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

"Is it viable to live life in a state that passes between "that's it!” and “that’s it?" A poetry of simply dealing with things."

My close reading of Stephanie Cawley's poem, "Brutal Fiction" Published in Bennington Review):
thekalliope.org/brutal-ficti...

Kent's review of Dissonance 5/5: If you were to map a poem, or you were to lay a poem over a map, so you could see the contours and roadways beneath the paper. So, if it were a map of the foothills, where you’re living, or you’v...

"That’s the poetry of Dykstra’s book. The awareness of place, the commitment to accuracy, like a map is accurate, and the natural, observational statement a map makes."

from my goodreads review of Kristin Dykstra's Dissonance
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

"I've always liked thinking that sin isn't really that sinful in the eyes of God, because when I sin, I'm conscious of God. God’s on my mind."

from my thoughts on @agdietzman.bsky.social's poem "Yet." It is assuredly sinful to read the poem. Proceed with caution!
thekalliope.org/yet-by-alish...