Kent Shaw
@kentdshaw.bsky.social
Second book: Too Numerous (UMass Press, 2019). CW Prof (Wheaton College in MA). US Navy veteran.
"The challenge in this specific-moment-versus-the-larger-frame situation is how individual moments feel accountable only to an individual-ish frame. But the book is pointing to a much broader frame." from my review of Sara Wainscott's The Star Cabins: www.thekalliope.org/review-the-s...
REVIEW: The Star Cabins (Rescue Press, 2026)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
A tragic irony, where the poet recognizes his mortality. How would it feel to understand you have a finite number of words. For Palmer, it makes words fewer and seemingly meaningless." from my review of Michael Palmer's Little Elegies for Sister Satan: www.thekalliope.org/review-littl...
REVIEW: Little Elegies for Sister Satan (New Directions, 2021)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"Garnett’s poems are the softness of standing water. They’re the tactile pleasure picking up an old Erasermate pen you used in the 1980s. They’re a poetry gesturing to the poetic catalog of vast trivial inventories." from my review of Callie Garnett's Shit Hike: www.thekalliope.org/review-hit-h...
REVIEW: Shite Hike (The Song Cave, 2026)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"It’s hard not to correlate Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings with the threaded reality George Oppen presents in his Seascape poems, especially with 'Some San Francisco Poems.'" from my review of George Oppen's Seascape www.thekalliope.org/review-seasc...
micro-REVIEW: Seascape: Needle's Eye (Sumac Press, 1972)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"Rivera’s epic journey to becoming himself requires multiple starts that vary in their truths, or their resonances." from my review of Roque Raquel Salas Rivera's Algarabía: www.thekalliope.org/review-algar...
REVIEW: Algarabía (Graywolf, 2025)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
@garvansam.bsky.social "Swensen’s book participates in between a poetics of the impromptu and a poetics of the consistently meaningful. It’s a position similar to the relationship American poetry has to the cooked and the raw." from my review of Cole Swensen's Veer www.thekalliope.org/review-veer
REVIEW: Veer (Alice James Books, 2026)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"What if we were to resurrect the overwhelming fact of so much nature existing around people, and rethink what thinking is." from my review of Cody-Rose Clevidence's The Grimace of Eden, Now: www.thekalliope.org/review-the-g...
REVIEW: The Grimace of Eden, Now (Fonograf, 2024)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"Perhaps this tension between volatility and direction could be seen as the primary anchor for Rosie Stockton’s Fuel. Especially as those ideas might relate to the actions taken on either side of a romantic relationship." from my review of Rosie Stockton's Fuel: www.thekalliope.org/review-fuel
REVIEW: Fuel (Nightboat Books, 2025)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"I’m glad that Molly Ledbetter definitely has things she likes and doesn’t like, and she thinks about it carefully. And I’m glad she writes in this style that gets in my head like it does." from my review of Molly Ledbetter's Air Ball www.thekalliope.org/review-air-b...
REVIEW: Air Ball (After Hours Editions, 2025)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"Reading Warren is like saying the word “assiduous” to yourself, for the thick sensation it puts in your mouth and for the actual definition of the word." from my review of Alli Warren's I Love It Though www.thekalliope.org/review-i-lov...
REVIEW: I Love It Though (Nightboat, 2017)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"One of the foundations for this book involves a critique of the capitalist terminology that contributes to “ownership.” What is it to own? How close does the owned object exist to the owner?" from my review of Robyn Schiff's A Woman of Property www.thekalliope.org/review-a-wom...
REVIEW: A Woman of Property (Penguin, 2016)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"The might happen tone in Courtney Bush is somewhere between the dread I often feel in Sandra Simonds’s poems and the tenuousness in Megan Fernandes’s work. Tense, tense, tense." from my review of Courtney Bush's I Love Information www.thekalliope.org/review-i-lov...
REVIEW: I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, 2023)
Do you have an unhealthy obsession? Someone who’s always on the margins. That weird game some couples play with a “hall pass.” Where they keep infidelity in the margins, I guess so there’s always a po...
thekalliope.org
"Prepare for a book that takes you deep into domestic poeticness. The inside of a house morphing into the inside of an apartment morphing into a photograph catching the view from a window looking out at the clothesline." from my review of Zach Savich's Momently www.thekalliope.org/review-momen...
REVIEW: Momently (Black Ocean, 2024)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"Talone's poems’ reactiveness. Like that soft life inside a throat. Its sensitivities precluding a complete sentence’s worth of reflection." from my review of Bridget Talone's The Soft Life www.thekalliope.org/review-the-s...
REVIEW: The Soft Life (Wonder, 2018)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"In many ways Walsh is a poet urging his reader to stay the moment, pause it, even as the language he uses to make the moment pushes that moment past itself." from my review of Michael Joseph Walsh's A Season: www.thekalliope.org/review-a-sea...
REVIEW: A Season (University of Georgia Press, 2026)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"Nadelberg’s sentences feel more subtle. Like holding wet sand. The subtle shifts if you start moving your hand." from my review of Amanda Nadelberg's Shake Until Cloudy www.thekalliope.org/review-shake...
REVIEW: Shake Until Cloudy (The Song Cave, 2026)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"What do you do to think about sex? Do you move in your seat? Do you text? Do you remember that song by Salt n Peppa, where everyone in the band wants to talk about sex. Caroline Rayner was there." from my review of Craoline Rayner's The Moan Wilds www.thekalliope.org/review-the-m...
REVIEW: The Moan Wilds (Shabby Doll House, 2023)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"If you can relax into a state of mind that moves like a spiral, and coalesces like spirals, you’ll be in the right headspace for reading Ochoa’s book." from my review of Antonio Ochoa's Small Sargasso Mountains / Pequeñas Cordilleras de Sargazo www.thekalliope.org/review-small...
micro-REVIEW: Small Sargasso Mountains / Pequeñas cordilleras de sargazo (Nightboat, 2026)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"With an elaborate intimacy. The sharing dreams type of intimacy. And by sharing, I mean the poet has asked her friends to submit their dreams for inclusion in her book." from my review of Kay Gabriel's Perverts www.thekalliope.org/review-perve...
REVIEW: Perverts (Nightboat, 2025)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"When Alisoun sings in Caroline Bergvall’s book Alisoun Sings, she relates the long reach of unheard feminist thinking throughout history." from my review of Caroline Bergvall's Alisoun Sings: www.thekalliope.org/review-aliso...
REVIEW: Alisoun Sings (Nightboat, 2019)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"There is something to Wong’s poems that have contradiction at their center. Or there’s contradiction, and then there’s also the the tightened poetic phrasing based on torqued enjambment and slashes in the middle of lines." from my review of Stella Wong's Stem: www.thekalliope.org/review-stem
REVIEW: Stem (Princeton University Press, 2024)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"The poems Chen crafts express a vivid and especially visual interpretation of concession. Like the space displaced should should have overwhelmed the poet, and to a degree it does." from my review of Yongyu Chen's Perennial Counterpart: www.thekalliope.org/review-peren...
REVIEW: Perennial Counterpart (Nightboat, 2026)
thekalliope.org
"I read Browne’s poems as a caution against love. Because there is a way love can sublime the world. It can unfold the world, like watching a dance troupe shape itself into a flower blooming." from my review of Mahogany L. Browne's Chrome Valley: www.thekalliope.org/review-chrom...
REVIEW: Chrome Valley (Liveright, 2023)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"One of the challenges of books that avidly embrace a larger project is negotiating the immensity felt by the poet and the actual content the poet is going to give the reader access to." from my review of Sophia Terazawa's Oracular Maladies www.thekalliope.org/review-oracu...
REVIEW: Oracular Maladies (Noemi, 2026)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"Alidio’s Traceable Relation addresses the didactic. In particular, the presumption that didactic writing could truly lead its reader to a set meaning, leading to meanings through a variety of mediums." from my review of Kimberly Alidio's Traceable Relation: www.thekalliope.org/review-trace...
REVIEW: Traceable Relation (Fonograf, 2025)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"But there is a depth to disaster that dwells in the personal. It’s a rhythm the disaster uses to play through the body. It’s a portioning, as Triplett reveals in Bad Forecast." from my review of Steffan Triplett's Bad Forecast www.thekalliope.org/review-bad-f...
REVIEW: Bad Forecast (Essay Press, 2024)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
"Like these are the monologues when you barely have time to think. Because the glamorous life is always pressing in on the self." from my review of Sadie Dupuis's Cry Perfume www.thekalliope.org/review-cry-p...
micro-REVIEW: Cry Perfume (Black Ocean, 2022)
Tags for this collection
thekalliope.org
Cindy Juyong Ok's translations in a recent issue of Gulf Coast were so good. I took some extra time to write about Kim Hyesoon's "In Front of a Round Wall" www.thekalliope.org/everything-c...
Everything comes back in a form of
thekalliope.org
"On another level, though, the book is about women growing through girlhood to arrive at what seems inevitable, the life of a mother." from my review of Diamond Forde's The Book of Alice www.thekalliope.org/review-the-b...
REVIEW: The Book of Alice (Scribner, 2026) | Notion
General Thoughts
thekalliope.org
"Unfortunately, the lyric does not ensure 1:1 representation, especially when it comes to something like generational trauma." from my review of Asiya Wadud's No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body www.thekalliope.org/review-no-kn...
REVIEW: No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body (Nightboat, 2021) | Notion
General Thoughts
thekalliope.org