bipoc poets

Review: Crooked Smiling Light by Alan King

| Rebecca Valley
Crooked Smiling Light by Alan W King

Crooked Smiling Light by Alan King (Plan B Press 2021)

Reviewed by Devon Balwit

Alan King’s newest poetry collection, Crooked Smiling Light, (Plan B Press, 2021) moves from punch to caress, offering the lie of easy and sudden transformation, but in the hard-fought, zig-zag feint of everyday effort. Along the way, the reader encounters metaphors from boxing and marathon, giants of history like Nelson Mandela and Amiri Baraka, Whitman’s Learn’d Astronomer, the Bible’s Goliath, Roy Hargrove and the Black Lives Matter protests. All illustrate a man’s life as he moves from son to father, seeking what we all do—love and a meaningful place in the world.

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Review: Seeing the Body by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

| Rebecca Valley

Seeing the Body by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (WW Norton and Co. 2020)

Reviewed by Margaret Anne Kean

“…her body was the only home/I cared about.”

Poet Marilyn Nelson has said “when you go to listen to a poet read, you leave having learned not only about the poet’s reality but also about the reality you are living.” She calls this “communal pondering.” Through Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ exquisite fifth book, Seeing the Body, we are invited into communal pondering about the physicality of grief, silence and absence, as the poet grapples with her mother’s death, its effect on the poet’s body and psyche, and the necessity of living beyond such a monumental loss.

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Review: Some Are Always Hungry by Jihyun Yun

| Rebecca Valley

Some Are Always Hungry by Jihyun Yun (University of Nebraska Press 2020)

Reviewed by Lane Berger

I think the worst must be finished. / Whether I am right, don’t tell me.

—“The Leaving Season”

In 2020, the year of things we tried to abolish, let us at least rid ourselves of this: ‘The Debut,’ held as a foray; the Debut Artist’s contrition, inevitable. Not since Slow Lightening, My Private Property, or The Collected Stories of Grace Paley have I dog-eared anything like my copy of Some Are Always Hungry, a debut poetry collection in which Jihyun Yun brings the reader—spoonful by shattering spoonful—into awareness of the near-unbearable state of being.

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