Write Bloody

[REVIEW] The Year of No Mistakes, by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

Posted on by

year

Write Bloody
108 pgs/$15.00

Review by Jason Carney

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s sixth book, The Year of No Mistakes, is a book of transitions. Movement is a strong thread throughout the most sophisticated offering this poet has made to date. Her voice is authentic and precise. The whole of the text seems as if not only the poems are in transition, but the poet as well, as if the narrator is searching for wholeness by leaving parts of herself behind.

The easiest transitional element to spot is the physical location of the poems. The reader is constantly moving page to page—Chicago, Brooklyn, Austin, Queens, and various cities in between. This movement seems natural and fluid, as if the book is piecing together the signs of her life, with the most important of these examinations being the relationships the narrator has developed and outgrown. The Year of No Mistakes is a book of remembrances and reflections, presented in a tangible and visceral manner, relevant to each of our lives. A clear example of this is the poem “The Bowery.”

We danced like ball bearings.
We laughed like ripped newspapers.
We smoked like backwards rain clouds.
We kissed like slammed doors. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Songs From Under the River: Early & New Work by Anis Mojgani

Posted on by

 

~by Stanton Hancock

Songs from Under the River

 

$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collection, Songs From Under the River, Mojgani has pasted together a vivid collage comprised of new works, previously unpublished early poems, and classic staples of his live readings.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 →