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Book and Chapbook Reviews:  Comstock Review Poets 

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 Click on the letters above to see reviews by authors last name.

Authors - J

Bonnie Jacobson brings us In Joanna's House (Cleveland State, 1998), a compelling collection of forty-six wildly inventive poems about the fictional Joanna, whose agile mind ponders everything in her own unique way. (added 8/05) 

Michael Jennings is the author of Silky Thefts (Orchises Press, 2007), one of the loveliest books to appear in 2007. Superbly crafted, especially the sequence of sonnets for his mother, these lyrical poems travel through both time and space, mining the memories of childhood and youth, of Paris and New Orleans, the exotic scents of an earlier Iran. Metaphor and imagery are outstanding and the diction, its surreally-swirled language, delight the ear. The genuine and intense emotion that permeates each poem gives the reader the experience of recollected love and loss: altogether stunning! There is also an earlier collection, Totems (Basfal,1994), a visually exciting book of wildlife photographs by Scott Ian Barry with poems by Jennings to illustrate each animal. Timber wolves to crocodiles and the great horned owl, they are all here in thirty-five fine poems and photos. (updated 12/07).

Gwendolyn Jenson's Birthright (Birch Book Press, 2011)  This collection of poems begs to be read again and again.  And then you will say, thank you for rich, metrical pieces, full and clear, breathtaking. Gwendolyn Jensen’s masterful use of rhythm and form, of repetition astounds us.  She speaks of what’s lost in childhood in “Expulsion,”

 

                                                When I was a girl I had a golden place,

                                                a creek with over-hanging foliage

                                                that dappled me as if it were a white

                                                and private wall, it sheltered me from hurt

                                                I did not understand.

 

 or found in “Swagger,”         

 

                                                I am a schooner’s figurehead,

                                                I cut the ocean rim,

                                                The shuddering seas they part for me.

                                                And so I go to school.

 

or felt at “Recess”:

 

                                                For the slight, the silent child, recess

                                                Means pretending that she does not mind

                                                That all around her arm in arm are friends

                                                Absorbed in each other.

 

In the series “At Home With Children,” she takes us into motherhood, exposes a woman’s loneliness amid the fray, a writer’s wish for solitude and time “to bloom again, “the  need

for quietude.

 

In “The Whistler,” she shares the melody of Largo from the New World Symphony

 

                                                and she leans toward the sound,

                                                enlarged by hope or something harder.

                                               

 

 

She remembers when she’s heard the sound.  And we stop there, in this book, and remember our own connections to the music. 

 

                                                Life has places for that tune,

                                                a father’s whistle, a mother’s sigh,

                                                a passing song, identified,

                                                unknown,

                                                someone late coming home.

 

 

Or a group of poems begging to be reread, too lovely to forget.  Haunting as the song, a wanting to go home. (Review by Ellen McNeal, 2012)

Out Of The Ordinary (Impatiens Press, 1994) is Robert K. Johnson's fourth book of poetry. The poems are in Johnson's style of incisive directness and focus on daily life, family, marriage and his careers as both teacher and writer. There are also a number of excellent dramatic monologues.

The Blessing: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 2000)is a collection of six books by poet Richard Jones. To quote from Booklist's review: "Lightness of touch and understated elegance." With deceptive ease and scrupulous economy of means, Jones portrays the human face of loneliness, desire, loss and the redemptive power of awareness and acceptance. What may seem melancholy becomes, in these deftly handled lines and acute images, consoling and quietly inspiring." (added 8/05)

Allison Joseph is the gifted African-American poet and editor of Crab Orchard Review. Her four books: Soul Train (Carnegie Mellon, 1997), In Every Seam (Pitt, 1997), Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon, 2003), and her newest, the prize-winning Worldly Pleasures (Word, 2004) are wry and bittersweet yet overall jubilant poems of memory about growing-up as a black girl in an urban neighborhood. These are wise, powerful, human.



 

 
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