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Heliotropia
Manahil BandukwalaPoetryBrick Books, 202499 pagesISBN: 9781771316347$23.95Reviewed by Tara Wohlleben Heliotropia is Manahil Bandukwala’s second book of poetry, exploring love, distance, and home across five sections. While heliotropism describes how plants move in relation to the sun, Bandukwala explores how we move in relation to love. In the preface to the book, the poem “Season of Sunflowers” introduces the importance of patience: “how precious seconds are, and thirds, and//fourths, and so on. There is rarely lasting love/in a first.” The first section covers “Seventeen Months of Distance” with one poem per month, each with an epigraph related to love, longing, or distance. Here we live in “This universe where fear collides/with…
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Unbecoming
Neil SurkanMcGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021112 pagesISBN: 9780228008910$20.00Reviewed by Emily Brandstaetter Unbecoming by Neil Surkan is a transformative, melodic, and inquisitive collection of poems devoted to investigating a world deteriorating moment by miniscule moment in shifts rarely seen by the naked eye. The book is dedicated to his son Edi — “Edi, whenever you start reading, this is for you” — and the author includes a Notes section at the back of the book to reference works featured throughout. Surkan’s imagery offers fresh takes on complex concepts as his lines dance on the page. There’s a simple elegance to his musings as in “Span,” where Surkan…. The collection is intense…
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Fry
Pamela Medland reads her poem “Fry” published in Portal 2024.
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Tempest
Laurent Lemay reads his poem “Tempest” published in Portal 2024.
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Compound
Elke Sorenson reads her poem “Compound” published in Portal 2024.
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Please Don’t Touch Me
Taylor Fleming reads her poem “Please Don’t Touch Me” published in Portal 2024.
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Start Here
Claire Gordon reads her poem “Start Here” published in Portal 2024.
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Field Notes
Claire Gordon reads her poem “Field Notes” published in Portal 2024.
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Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead
Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead selects poems from Catherine Graham’s works published over the last 20 years--Pupa (2003), The Red Element (2008), Winterkill (2010), Her Red Hair Rises with The Wings of Insects (2013), and The Celery Forest (2017)—and places them chronologically after new poems that open the collection for a total of six sections in the book
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The Devil Every Day
John Nyman’s A Devil Every Day is a holy trinity—verse, rhythm, and form—compiled into a diabolical 3-part collection of poetry that examines classical Christianity through a modern lens: Becoming, Becoming Evil, and Praise God. Topics range from houseplants to dreams, government to whiteness, divinity to hellish incantations.
