Quill and Quire

Poetry

Dear Ghost,

By Catherine Owen

Catherine Owen’s latest collection is billed as an “extended love letter” to her poetic influences and fascinations. Poignant and honest, Dear Ghost, breathes with a tenderness that is also blunt and frequently melancholy: “I apologize ... Read More »

March 20, 2017 | Filed under: Poetry

★ Xiphoid Process

By Kevin Connolly

A great deal of poetry – and thus, a great deal of poetry criticism – is taken up, whether explicitly or otherwise, with the notion of tradition. Where a poet is situated within a tradition, ... Read More »

March 20, 2017 | Filed under: Poetry

Bad Ideas

By Michael V. Smith

Michael V. Smith’s new poetry collection, Bad Ideas, is comprised of meditations on mourning, longing, sexuality, and gender. Throughout the book are poems about the passing of Smith’s father, poems that question masculinity, and poems ... Read More »

March 20, 2017 | Filed under: Poetry

The Analyst

By Molly Peacock

As Molly Peacock points out in a note at the end of her latest poetry collection, an artistic rendering of her 37-year-long relationship with her psychotherapist, it’s “rare to have such a long analytical experience ... Read More »

March 6, 2017 | Filed under: Poetry

Barbaric Cultural Practice

By Penn Kemp

It seems strangely à propos to see refined, award-winning poet and activist Penn Kemp return to a thematics of barbarism in her latest book. Kemp opens with “Tip Line,” a poem that sets the stage ... Read More »

December 6, 2016 | Filed under: Poetry

Yes or Nope

By Meaghan Strimas

In Meaghan Strimas’s third collection, the poet picks up where she left off in 2010’s A Good Time Had by All. Not one to shy away from life’s rougher edges, Strimas possesses a knack for ... Read More »

December 6, 2016 | Filed under: Poetry

How to Draw a Rhinoceros

By Kate Sutherland

Kate Sutherland’s How to Draw a Rhinoceros is a curious little book, presenting a series of poems about rhinoceroses with a focus on their commodification as spectacle over the course of western colonial history. The ... Read More »

November 17, 2016 | Filed under: Poetry

How Festive the Ambulance

By Kim Fu

How Festive the Ambulance is the debut poetry collection from the author of the acclaimed 2014 novel For Today I Am a Boy. The poems, which are mostly based around thought-provoking situations, demonstrate Fu’s attention ... Read More »

April 13, 2016 | Filed under: Poetry