Boston Review's Fall Poetry Microreviews Are Here!

Fall is here and so is poetry! In the latest Boston Review digital edition, Ed Pavlić, Andrew Zawacki, Tomas Unger, Cassandra Cleghorn, and Cassandra Balzer review books by Andre Bradley, Barbara Claire Freeman, Maureen N. McLane, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and Amy King. Reviewing Bradley's work called Dark Archives, Pavlić recounts "Dark Archives moves by these methods, accompanying, framing, and articulating the fears of its speaker." From there: 

One loose page carries the photographs of sixteen graduates, likely high school; on its reverse side appear sixteen headshots of young people, all thirty-two  faces brown, all of them except one staring at the camera. Bradley’s speaker informs us, “I dropped out of school. I left to learn.” In light of this departure, Bradley collects intellectual, spiritual, material, and racial boxes—basements, backboards, rings for boxing, hoops for hooping. The light of the gaze he invites on these boxes does not defeat American circumstance so much as it empowers subjects—black subjects—to deal with darkness through a subtle, unnamed sense of mutual consequence. To hold Andre Bradley’s Dark Archives is to arrive at an extremely rare proximity to the force of such human consequence, an answer to certain of our needs made, as one suspects they must be made, as much of shadow as of light.

Continue reading at Boston Review.