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Our March review highlights are here to help you find a spring read. Below you'll find reviews from Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Heavy Feather, and more. To view previous review highlights, click this link to check out our archives.




Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora Edited by Christopher Nelson | Green Linden Press

"For me, though, I encountered the best surprises in poems like Reza Baraheni’s “Daf,” which plays with the form and sounds of the daf, a tambourine-like drum. Stephen Watts’s co-translation with the author struck me as itself untranslatable, the words melting into one another and reemerging transformed."
   — Samad Alavi, World Literature Today

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Punks by John Keene | The Song Cave
" Ranging across two decades of published work, this volume of new and selected poems testifies to his stylistic dexterity as he explores issues of queer and African American identity against a backdrop of landscapes both intimate and historical, urban and pastoral...This is lyricism that holds the speaker to account for the actuality of experience; it is set within a volume that teaches us “things” about the beauty of multifarious speech.”
   —  Albert Mobilio & John Yau, Hyperallergic

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Runaways by Michael J. Seidlinger | Future Tense Books
"Runaways was written in New Hampshire when Seidlinger fled Brooklyn on the eve of lockdown. Of course, it was. It’s a healing book. Its despair is laced with humor. In the end, it’s not just the thing we make but the making of it, with all its vagaries, that give us those moments of connection to live in, share, and get the job done."

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Thirteen Quintets for Lois by Jay Wright | Flood Press
"Intellectually rigorous and empathically compelling, Donald Edem Quist’s work juxtaposes literary allusions with the author’s own lived experience. Here, too, Quist explores questions of racial stereotypes and the expectations of others, and the psychological toll that both can take."
   — Gregory Cowles, The New York Times

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Before Stonewall by Edward M. Cohen | Awst Press
“Perhaps most notably, the language across these stories also relaxes as fear begins its slow retreat. From the stilted parental greetings and overly polished manners of the opening tales, a new vernacular animates life in the collection’s later accounts. Hustlers, campy retorts, drag queens, dramatic spats, and the good old “You wanna fuck?” replace the scripted lines of life a decade earlier.”
   — Patrick Davis, Gertrude Press

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