Poetry Book Reviews

Ugandan born poet Ssemanda casts light on critical issues that we all need to explore in the collection of personal, political, and perceptive works, Colored Armpits: Poems for Social Justice.

Ssemanda’s book of verse is divided in three sections – “The Mzungu,” “The Armpits,” and “The African African.” Each touches on different aspects of the human condition, and particularly, the condition of African and other third world people in connection or confrontation with first world denizens and value systems.

Mzungu is the African language term used in Uganda and elsewhere to designate white people – whether they be colonialists, […]

In Kaleidoscope of Colors, poet Robert A Cozzi has created a new collection of his verse using the motif of the kaleidoscope, a device that fractures and re-orders reality in microcosm, just as poems reduce and revive the color and a shape of life’s situations to give them new meaning.

In the opening Author’s Note, Cozzi questions why we always seem to “explain emotions,” calling our feelings “tricky devils.” But he likes them, even when they are painful and cloud his mind. Despite this rather dark segue, his first poem, “Jumping Off the Shelf” is hopeful, using images of […]

Loving relationships in a multitude of aspects and progressions form the focus of this new, emotive collection of works by poet Gary W. Burns.

The poems in To You with Love are divided into four segments: “Woven,” “Ins and Outs,” “Serenities,” and “Amore.”

“Woven” expresses the lover’s longing for as-yet-unrealized interconnectedness with his beloved. He imagines “The fabric of me, you: Tapestry.” The poet invites his cherished friend to share in experiences of summer’s natural bounty, recalling the tulips that grew in his youth (“The Songsmith”), picking “The First Marigold,” and often comparing his feelings to light and the warmth […]