Poetry Book Reviews

In Blanket of Hearts, poet Robert A. Cozzi explores themes of love and memory and the bittersweet nexus of the two when a union ends. He captures the pain of seeing an old lover with their new flame, the chances not taken and still remembered years later, and the all-too-human desire to “hit the rewind button.” In other poems, he recalls the ecstasy of new love, “when everything tasted of ice cream” and desire is like an all-consuming riptide, pulling him toward oblivion. He charmingly describes the beloved’s voice as “the cinnamon in my hot chocolate.” The final poem […]

Planet Tome Reborn by Helene Pilibosian is a continuation of the story begun in her earlier work A New Orchid Myth. In this volume, Amethyst, Granite, and their daughter Taralee travel to Earth from their home planet Tome. Taralee meets and marries Ted in Boston, and the four protagonists embark on a mission to collect plant life and technology vital to Tome’s continued prosperity.

A hybrid of sci/fi fantasy and lyric poetry, the plot is a bit difficult to tease out from Pilibosian’s figurative lexicon and it is not always clear who is speaking or who is being referred […]

Candor Candy: Global Poems by Helene Pilibosian is a full-bodied collection exploring the space between humanity and nature, and the sadness and beauty therein, from the Amazon to the Thames to China and back to the US, where the poet resides, an Armenian-American, already by nature an international and globally-aware writer.

The poems strip back to the senses in color and form. They are somewhat reminiscent of Jon Fosse’s more nature-led pieces in form: combinations of natural elements and the senses, somewhat awry with the immediate and raw emotion of the poet in the moment, a cultural reference from modern-day […]

Daydream and Shadow: A Collection of Poetic Images by Nicholas Nossaman is a collection of poems and photographs about subjects large and small – from appreciating a meal to the scourge of war – using subtle, but evocative imagery.

A bit too often, Nossaman relies on prose being reformatted into verse, rather than a poetic cadence of its own, but the images he conveys still remain expressive. The most powerful element of these poems is finding poetry in small moments (drinking a cup of coffee, smoking a cigarette), which makes the book’s subheading – Poetic Images – all the more […]