by Avey Rips | Nov 14, 2016 | Drinking Gourd
The University of Hip-Hop is a love letter to the city of Chicago, or, more specifically, to Chicago at a particular moment in the poet’s life. It is a meditation on movement and migration that asks what it means to leave home, how to take home with you, and how...
by Avey Rips | Nov 14, 2016 | Drinking Gourd
Nowhere to Arrive takes as its subjects the whiplash of travel, the shuttling between disparate places and climes, and an unremitting sense of dislocation. These poems court the tension between the familiar and the foreign, between the self as distinct and the self as...
by Avey Rips | Nov 14, 2015 | Drinking Gourd
At turns humorous and heartbreaking, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named explores in both formal and free verse what it means to die, which is to say, also, what it means to live. In this collection, Sealey displays an exquisite sense of the lyric, as well...
by Avey Rips | Nov 14, 2014 | Drinking Gourd
In one of the poems in Instructions for Folding, Willie Lin writes, “it seemed you were away but not beyond language.” And accordingly, the voice in these poems is sometimes fervid, sometimes wry, moved to speech by the specific desire to speak to someone. The poems...
by Avey Rips | Nov 14, 2013 | Drinking Gourd
The winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, Rodney Gomez’s collection Mouth Filled with Night employs familiar emblems of Mexican American identity to repeatedly subvert expectations while intensifying the dilemmas of affiliation. The poems run beyond more...
by Avey Rips | Nov 15, 2012 | Drinking Gourd
Taking its cue from Toni Morrison’s declaration that “language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names,” Kristiana Rae Colón’s promised instruments stitches its own definitions for what is granted, what is surrendered, what is pilfered, and what...
