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West End Features
Everything Leads to Right Here, Right Now in Corinna Vallianatos’s Origin Stories
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Poetry
The Dreadful Stillness of Sarah Schweig’s The Ocean in the Next Room
Review
Conversation
Ken Harmon speaks to poet Anthony DiPietro about his new book, kiss and release, currently available from Unsolicited Press. Hear him read his poems, "Resurrection Spell" and "Unrequited Fuck Boy."
DiPietro's poem "Loving All These Men. Is That What I Think" is featured in West Trade Review's Spring 2023 print edition. Read it here.
"I’ve been doing? honey, if I’m real,
I been fuckin’ around."
Reviews of Recent and Forthcoming Titles
“The Rhapsody of Things as They Are”: Unabridged Truth in Diane Seuss’s Modern Poetry
Reviewed by Lisa Zerkle
Who's History? The Logic of Reality in Kathryn Davis's Versailles
Reviewed by D.W. White
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Deconstruction and Feeling in Latif Askia Ba’s The Choreic Period
Joanna Acevedo speaks to poet Robert Wood Lynn about about the influence of place on his work, his new book How to Maintain Eye Contact, and the importance of humor in poetry. Robert's work is featured in our Spring 2023 print edition.
Ken Harmon speaks to poet Richard Blanco about his new book, Homeland of My Body: New & Selected Poems, due out October 24, 2023, from Beacon Press. Hear Blanco read the new poems, "The Splintering" and "Why I Needed To."
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Literary Criticism
"The Revolution Comes from Within:
Interiority and Point of View in Selected Works of Rachel Cusk" by D.W. White
"A novel may be thought of as consisting of two parts, running concurrently with each other. The narrative function describes those aspects of a book which operate as, quite simply, the story. A character storming out of a room to confront a cheating spouse, a protagonist agonizing over what to wear in advance of seeing brunch with her mother-in-law, the detective going back to the crime scene after a flash of insight — these are all examples of narrative actions. Textual functions, on the other hand, are those that inform theme, character arc, tonality, or the like. Places, in other words, where the book acts ‘as a book’, where the design and craftsmanship come into play. The most effective writers often execute these functions simultaneously..." Read the entire piece here.
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Recent Video Poems
"Oysters" by Robert McDonald
from Summer 2024 collection of
Online Exclusives
"It Was Supposed to Be" by Ben Kline from the Summer 2024 collection of Online Exclusives
Relearning the Family: Melanie Cheng’s The Burrow Overcomes the Isolation of Grief
Reviewed by Max Parker
Michael Harper Interviews Alexandra Teague
" I’ve always written centrally by ear—i.e. by hearing when a word or line or poem is right—and while I don’t frequently write in meter, I definitely often work against a sort of ruffled and highly-enjambed iambic base, and am also paying a lot of attention to sonic echoes, whether direct rhymes or other patterns of recurring sounds that are driving the poem forward. I love being led by sound, and in a line like “something / squawky to it, something donkey about the wheels,” the word “donkey” emerged originally as a play off the sound of “squawky,” and then I decided to leave it because it’s strange and gets at another aspect of the poem’s fiddle music." Read the entire piece here.
