Arc Poetry

In Bridget Huh’s first collection of poetry, the polyphonic and synaesthetic Fugue Body, she writes, “Spanish distinguishes between two ways of being. / One that fluctuates. / Another you cannot escape.” It is within this precarious dialectic that Huh’s Fugue Body suspends itself, paradoxically “galloping / motionless” with an urgency whose tempo you cannot help […]

Guy Elston’s debut, The Character Actor Convention was a highly anticipated book for me personally. Having read bits and pieces of poems from it in the year or two preceding its publication, Elston’s poems always teemed with a certain likeability that I found so central to the manifold personalities portrayed in his strangely wonderful poetics. […]

When the poet Joseph Kidney visits a cathedral or gallery or museum, I imagine he stands exceptionally close to the art. The striking cover of his debut collection Devotional Forensics certainly suggests intense scrutiny. Of the twelve figures on a medieval rood screen in St. Michael and All Angels Church, Kidney’s book cover homes in […]

For Prince Edward Island-born O’Grady, water is everywhere: in sailings and landings, in rivers, tides and shorelines. His poems are populated by fishermen, water birds, and hermit crabs. A cup of coffee sits “unstirred [like] the black pool of night,” while days spent apart from a loved one “yawn wide as a slough.” Water is […]