Feb 05 2025
I honestly don’t recall the last time I read a novel in verse, but I’m glad I broke that spell with this powerful debut! Mason Zy’Aire Tyndall is a high school senior who has two goals: hone his battle rap skills to better fit the “Legend” moniker he’s working on and find a cute girl …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/02/05/if-you-knew-my-name-by-lisa-roberts-carter/
Oct 30 2024
Oh poetry, thou fickle siren, luring thousands of writers into your gentle-seeming embrace only to let them flounder on the sharp rocks of skill that underpin you. So here’s the deal, dear readers. Poetry is about image and emotion. Back in the day, it also used to be about form and rhyme. For better or …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/30/sitting-on-a-rock-by-gary-l-brinderson/
Sep 09 2024
What a delightful way to get kids in touch with their feelings! And this, mind you, is said by someone who has definitely given books about feelings, especially those targeted at kids, the hairy side eye, usually for being too sappy and twee. This collection of roughly 40 poems easily avoids that pitfall, while being …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/09/the-totally-not-boring-book-of-feelings-by-jolie-taylor-brandon-dorman/
Aug 16 2024
On the one hand, I’m happy for the interest in poetry that the viral success of Rupi Kaur has brought mainstream. On the other, well, you get the feeling that everyone feels that they can write poetry now. And yes, to a certain extent, everyone can write poetry. But too often writers confuse epigraphs with …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/08/16/reborn-by-abraham-rodriguez/
Dec 31 2023
Introducing her translation of The Iliad, Emily Wilson gets right to the heart of the matter. “The beautiful word minunthadios, ‘short-lived,’ is used of both Achilles and Hector, and applies to all of us. We die too soon, and there is no adequate recompense for the terrible, inevitable loss of life. Yet through poetry, the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/12/31/the-iliad-translated-by-emily-wilson/
Jun 15 2023
or Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr as he’s credited on the cover of this volume. In 2022, Willie Carver was named Kentucky Teacher of the Year. A homophobic vendetta led by just one woman caused him to decide, only months later, to leave the public school system, but not before testifying before Congress about the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/06/15/gay-poems-for-red-states-by-willie-carver/
May 12 2023
A Women In Horror Poetry Collection, Volume I Usually when I read poetry, I read in great big chunks, especially when reading a collection from one of my favorite poets. Even larger anthologies from different writers go by quickly, or at least in big thematic pieces. So I was a little surprised, but not in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/05/12/under-her-skin-edited-by-lindy-ryan-toni-miller/
Apr 09 2023
So here I am at the end of Seamus Heaney’s major collections. I came via the sideways path, the one that starts with his Nobel lecture, which is brilliant, and has repaid many re-readings. It took me through Finders Keepers a collection of his prose, and then through his Beowulf. I no longer remember just …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/09/human-chain-by-seamus-heaney/
Jan 29 2023
Things, moments, people, poems. Heaney finds inspiration for the poems in District and Circle in things that he encounters or imagines, moments he hopes to preserve or evoke in others, people he remembers, and poems he either recalls or translates. Places, which loomed larger in other collections, are less present here, though of course they …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/29/district-and-circle-by-seamus-heaney/
Dec 11 2022
At age 62, some 35 years after publishing his first book-length collection, six years after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Seamus Heaney might have settled into a particular style of poetry. In Electric Light, though, Heaney forges onward. The volume features at least three eclogues (a short, pastoral poem, often in dialogue; I had …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/11/electric-light-by-seamus-heaney/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire