~by Stanton Hancock

$15/88 pages

Write Bloody Publishing

If you’re not familiar with the poetry of Anis Mojgani, you’ve most likely been making a concerted effort to not pay attention.  As a two-time National Poetry Slam champion and the winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, Mojgani has more than demonstrated his performing prowess.  Likewise, his previous poetry collections The Feather Room and Over the Anvil We Stretch have aptly demonstrated that his poetry sings just as beautifully on the page as it does on the stage.  With his newest collection, Songs From Under the River, Mojgani has pasted together a vivid collage comprised of new works, previously unpublished early poems, and classic staples of his live readings.

Rather than simply present this collection chronologically as would be typical in an anthology such as this, Mojgani has instead compiled a sort of poetry mix-tape.  The poems seem to have no discernable pattern to their organization yet the flow of the collection as a whole is too effective to be merely the result of happenstance.  Instead, the poems leap deftly back and forth through time and capture snapshots of one of modern poetry’s strongest voices at various points in his career.

The collection opens with the beaconing stanzas of “Closer.”  In this poem, Mojgani invites the reader to join him in a celebration of life and love.  Simultaneously welcoming and defiant, he urges the reader to join him as he extols:

So come closer, come into this. There are birds beating their wings beneath / your breastplate gentle sparrows aching to sing—come aching hearts! Come / soldiers of joy, doormen of truth! Come true-of-heart. Continue reading →