Tottenville Review

Leigh Stein makes cross-dimensional leaps in her debut poetry collection, her follow-up to a freshman novel that touts a voice relevant to an entire twenty-something year old generation. Encased in Stein’s irony and heartbroken affirmations, Dispatch from the Future does not restrict itself to ending points or starting lines, nor to definite futures or regretful pasts. With quarterly epigraphs from the likes of Horace and Albert Einstein to self-help relationship experts and Choose Your Own Adventure tales, Dispatch promises a relationship with the page, replete with confession, travel plans, affirmation, time travel, and canceled travel plans for time better spent staying indoors and reading books.

Continue reading "Novel Poetry: Choose the Leigh Stein Adventure"…

Bianca Stone is somewhat an aesthete in the poetry world, particularly the Brooklyn milieu that in recent years has capitalized on an emerging style: toughly sentimental, dashingly ironic, and deceivingly cagey writing.  It’s a world of young MFAs who run their own literary ventures, populate each other’s pages, tirelessly give readings, and are surprisingly not so keen on positing Brooklyn the literary innovator of the Northeast (though they would if called upon).  It’s a concrete world, one that cannot escape poetry’s distant imaginings, which creeps in on itself and then peers outward with willful adoration. Continue reading "Imagist Aesthete: On Bianca Stone’s New Chapbook"…

 In Sheet Music, Robert Gibb considers the natural world as well as the man-made one via the gaze of music—with an emphasis on classical, but also jazz—creating via language what otherwise might be drawn on score paper as musical notation. Two things strike you about Gibb and his poetry no matter what page you might flip to or how many poems you read: one, the daring-yet-consummate way he works with poetic form in his poems—never afraid to mold the form to the topic, yet never in a way that is too experimental or difficult. Second, Gibb approaches all manner of topics from trees to jazz to animals in a zoo with a steadfast sense of awe and wonder. An everyday thing—any everyday thing—are all fair game to Gibb, who seems more a journalist at heart, though one with a poet’s great gifts for detail and word-craft. Continue reading "Sheet Music: Poems"…

Poetry may be the most difficult of all literary forms to translate, and yet the beauty and depth of poetry are appreciated beyond the bounds of any given language—thus, poetry begs to be translated. Some of the greatest poets commonly read in English—Rimbaud, for example—are translated from another language and yet their books out-sell the works of many English-language poets. To think however that a contemporary Macedonian poet’s work would be the focus of a popular press, a non-academic volume, and still be furnished the care and expertise expected for a major academic work is impressive—nearly outlandish—and yet that is exactly what BOA Editions has provided with their book of poems by Nikola Madzirov, Remnants of Another Age. Continue reading "Another Age: the Macedonian Poetry of Nikola Madzirov"…