Posted July 4, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Genres: Poetry Pages: 89
Rating: 
Synopsis: An extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other.
Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects – love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire – and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate and hungry in their tender, close attention: ‘…the chief of police/facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola./A palm-sized photo of his father soaking/beside his left ear.’ This is an unusual, important book: both gentle and visceral, vulnerable and assured, and its blend of humanity and power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years.
Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a rare book of poetry I’ve actually heard about/seen around elsewhere, rather than stumbling across. I’ve heard it might work a bit better if you’ve read Vuong’s other work, but I haven’t, so I came to this cold.
And… left it pretty cold, unfortunately; there are some amazing images, some sharp sentences, but the overall effect just… didn’t quite come off for me. Some of the poems felt scattered, disjointed, and not necessarily intentionally so: I just couldn’t follow the train of thought, or in a couple of cases, simply didn’t care to.
Some beautiful language, that can’t be denied, but not my thing stylistically.
Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)
Tags: book reviews, books, Ocean Vuong, poetry
Posted June 25, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Parallax
Genres: Poetry Pages: 69
Rating: Synopsis: Capturing David Niven on a magical marble escalator to heaven in 1946, recording L. S. Lowry’s studio after his death, and peering into the illicit worlds of the Victorian Mutoscope, these poems document what is caught, and what is lost, when houses and cityscapes, servants and saboteurs are arrested in time by photography. Assured and unsettling, Sinéad Morrissey’s poems explore the paradoxes in what is seen, read, and misread in the surfaces of the presented world.
Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2013
I thought that Sinéad Morrissey’s Parallax was technically good — several moments of “ah, I see what you did there” or “that’s interesting”, but it didn’t really sink in for me somehow? I didn’t feel any hook in the gut or particular connection with the poems, even the ones that felt quite personal (though some of these were not autobiographical, to be clear: Morrissey tries on a few different voices, but that sort of thing can still feel personal!).
It was all… fine… but I didn’t pick out anything I particularly wanted to quote or save. I guess Sinéad Morrissey’s poetry isn’t quite for me, even though I found it technically good and accessible enough to read.
I’d maybe try something else by Morrissey in future, but I wouldn’t go out of my way.
Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)
Tags: book reviews, books, poetry, Sinéad Morrissey
Posted June 18, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
In the Hollow of the Wave
Genres: Poetry Pages: 96
Rating: 
Synopsis: In the Hollow of the Wave, the second collection by Nina Mingya Powles examines orientalism, art and artmaking in a time of ecological crisis. Engaging with the work of artists such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Yayoi Kusama, Etel Adnan and the fashion designer Guo Pei, these poems rework the notion of ekphrasis into something elemental and tactile, shaped by memory and landscapes of the body.
Nina Mingya Powles’ In the Hollow of the Wave is a bit of a multimedia collection, mixing poems with images of various bits of craftwork and images with words pasted onto them (a bit reminiscent of times of A Softer World, if anyone but me remembers that!). There are some interesting poem formats too.
I found it readable and there were some that stuck with me — the one about her grandfather(?) making quilts for her and her cousins was lovely. I didn’t get along with all of it, as ever with poetry (picky, I am, I know), especially some of the more experimental ones… but I’m glad I gave it a shot, and I am still left with the image of the retired biologist, making his grandchildren quilts. It seems like a lovely warm memory.
I wouldn’t mind trying other poetry by Nina Mingya Powles, either way.
Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)
Tags: book reviews, books, Nina Mingya Powles, poetry
Posted June 8, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
A Dress of Locusts
Genres: Poetry Pages: 64
Rating: 
Synopsis: Woven from threads of Aramaic, Spanish, Ancient Greek, Sumerian and Arabic, A Dress of Locusts is an unforgettable song cycle in which the living and dead sing back and forth to one another. Here, Safa Khatib journeys across the possibilities of language and self, asking us to dwell in the thresholds between the 'old' and the 'new'.
There are some very striking images and strongly expressed scenes in Safa Khatib’s
A Dress of Locusts (including the image that gives the title!), and I’m kind of sad I don’t like it more. The poems are very readable and easy to follow (except for one or two where I found the layout slightly annoying), but I didn’t really find my way in.
A large part of that is the sexual content of the poems. I wouldn’t generally consider myself prudish at all, and of course sex has a place in poetry, but the way sex is treated in these poems — I don’t know. Each time it stuck out and felt like a surprise, an inclusion designed to shock and disrupt, and it didn’t work well for me.
Maybe reading it unprepared as a random choice from the National Poetry Library was part of it; sometimes I think poetry can benefit from a little context. That said, I don’t think it would ever have quite worked for me, though as ever I’m really glad to be able to explore poets I’ve never read before and broaden my frame of reference. I don’t regret reading it, even if I didn’t enjoy it.
Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)
Tags: book reviews, books, poetry, Safa Khatib
Posted May 28, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
An Interesting Detail
Genres: Poetry Pages: 80
Rating: Synopsis: An important and timely collection spanning time and space, pain and power, from an innovative poetic voice
The poems in An Interesting Detail confront our shared, layered past (both planetary and human) and its knotty relationship to the present, stretching from today to prehistory, in a voice that is knowing and yearning, sincere and sardonic, and at times defiant. Campanello's prose poems, brief lyric outbursts, and poetic sequences ludically navigate catastrophe and sweep us up in the minutiae of everyday life, which includes pain and illness, machinations of power and moments of suspended connection.
Kimberly Campanello’s An Interesting Detail was a random choice from the National Poetry Library’s catalogue, which I’m using to help me try out new poets and broaden my horizons a bit.
The collection is mostly made up of prose poetry, and unfortunately I’m not a fan of the style at all: there are some interesting images, linked by non-sequiturs, and I found that deeply frustrating. It felt disjointed for the sake of being disjointed, unintelligible for the sake of being unintelligible, and I just couldn’t get into it — in theory, I like prose poems (and have always liked writing them), but these just felt like they went nowhere.
As ever, since this is poetry, it could be a defect on my part — failing to understand the poet, or what the poem in question was trying to do. Still, not my thing.
Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)
Tags: book reviews, books, Kimberly Campanello, poetry
Posted May 22, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
The Black Flamingo
Genres: Verse Novel,
Poetry,
Young Adult Pages: 416
Rating: Synopsis: Michael is a mixed-race gay teen growing up in London. All his life, he's navigated what it means to be Greek-Cypriot and Jamaican--but never quite feeling Greek or Black enough.
As he gets older, Michael's coming out is only the start of learning who he is and where he fits in. When he discovers the Drag Society, he finally finds where he belongs--and the Black Flamingo is born.
Told with raw honesty, insight, and lyricism, this debut explores the layers of identity that make us who we are--and allow us to shine.
I’m not a big one for YA or for verse novels, in general, but I decided to give Dean Atta’s The Black Flamingo a try after discussing verse novels semi-recently on my blog as part of the Let’s Talk Bookish discussion linkup. I remember hearing a lot about it when it first came out, because it’s basically a British queer coming of age story informed by the author’s Jamaican and Greek Cypriot descent.
The verse part… I’m kinda shrug about it as poetry, in and of itself, but it works well to distill the story down to key moments and feelings, rather than lingering on details that ultimately don’t matter. It makes the coming of age themes and the teenage messiness a lot more palatable for someone who remembers being a teen and had quite enough of it, thank you: it condenses everything down and only lingers on what’s really meaningful.
As an evocation of black/mixed (this is the term the character uses, to be clear) identity, and of growing into queerness and experimenting with drag as a way of learning to really break out and express all that, it works well. The character’s path to that point makes a lot of sense, you can feel the emotional arc toward it, and the confused/confusing emotions and thoughts come across well through the verse format.
Overall, it’s still not my thing exactly, but I’m glad I gave it the time and enjoyed it, and would definitely recommend it more to those interested in YA and verse novels.
Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)
Tags: book reviews, books, Dean Atta, poetry, verse novel, young adult
Posted May 15, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Somewhere There Is A Sky For Us
Genres: Poetry Pages: 170
Rating: Synopsis: This anthology gathers the many voices and textures of Language is a Queer Thing, a 3-year long poetic dialogue between queer voices from India and the UK, unfolding over three years of exchange, residencies and performance.
These poems are prayers, protests, lullabies, warnings, duets, sonatas and satires.
Somewhere There Is A Sky For Us is the product of a three-year project involving queer poets from India and the UK sharing their work, doing residencies and exchanges, etc. It’s an interesting spread of poems, and often plays with form (sometimes a bit difficult to read in print form, since they’ve turned it sideways on the page so you have to turn the book). It’s mostly in English, but other languages are mixed in here and there.
Overall it wasn’t quite my thing — I think I’m more of a traditionalist about poetry at times, and don’t love ones that play with shapes on the page or go very abstract. There’s a few prose-poems, which IÂ can enjoy, but didn’t really stand out to me.
As ever, there are a few images and lines that stand out, and I’m glad I gave it a shot! Just not my personal cup of tea. Which is perhaps an unfair figure of speech, as I’ve never met a cup of tea I liked; rest assured that I didn’t read this expecting not to like it, as it’s a pretty cool sounding project.
Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)
Tags: book reviews, books, Joelle Taylor, poetry
Posted May 7, 2026 by Nicky in Uncategorized / 2 Comments
Felicity
Genres: Poetry Pages: 96
Rating: 
Synopsis: Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, celebrates love in her new collection of poems.
If I have any secret stash of poems, anywhere, it might be about love, not anger, Mary Oliver once said in an interview. Finally, in her stunning new collection, Felicity, we can immerse ourselves in Oliver's love poems. Here, great happiness abounds. Our most delicate chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver has described her work as loving the world. With Felicity she examines what it means to love another person. She opens our eyes again to the territory within our own hearts; to the wild and to the quiet. In these poems, she describes--with joy--the strangeness and wonder of human connection. As in Blue Horses, Dog Songs, and A Thousand Mornings, with Felicity Oliver honors love, life, and beauty.
Mary Oliver’s poetry is gorgeous. This was the first of her collections I’d read, though I’d undoubtedly come across her poems before, and I loved how readable and accessible it feels — she isn’t trying to mystify, and her poems share her joy in the world, sometimes even in moments that someone else could make into a tragedy.
It’s actually hard to pick favourites, but here’s one in its entirety that I loved, ‘Everything That Was Broken’:
Everything that was broken has
forgotten it’s brokenness. I live
now in a sky-house, through every
window the sun. Also your presence.
Our touching, our stories. Earthy
and holy both. How can this be, but
it is. Every day has something in
it whose name is Forever.
Definitely a poet I want to read more of.
Rating: 5/5 (“loved it”)
Tags: book reviews, books, Mary Oliver, poetry
Posted April 22, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Blue Horses
Genres: Poetry Pages: 83
Rating: Synopsis: Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually. Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us. In this stunning collection, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has defined her life's work. Herons, sparrows, owls and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry and impermanence. Whether considering a bird's nest, the seeming patience of oak trees or the paintings of Franz Marc, Mary Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments. Blue Horses asks what it truly means to belong to this world and to live in it attuned to all its changes. 'To be human,' she shows us, 'is to sing your own song'.
Mary Oliver’s work is definitely a proof that poetry doesn’t have to be impenetrable — there’s something very open and airy about her work, something that invites you in, and she seemed to take such joy in the world and to have had a curiosity about everything.
Here’s the end of one poem that stuck with me:
I’ll just leave you with this.
I don’t care how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin. It’s
enough to know that for some people
they exist, and that they dance.
Definitely going to read more of her collections; kind of wish I’d picked up one or two more at the same time during my trip to Gay’s the Word!
Rating: 5/5 (“loved it”)
Tags: book reviews, books, Mary Oliver, poetry
Posted April 15, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
milk and honey
Genres: Poetry Pages: 204
Rating: Synopsis: milk and honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity. It is split into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache.
milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.
I ended up picking up Rupi Kaur’s milk and honey collection because Let’s Talk Bookish will be discussing “instapoetry” (Instagram poetry) on Friday, and I hadn’t knowingly read any, so I figured I’d try one of the famous ones and see what I think.
I get that people look down on Instapoetry and similar so I want to be clear, I don’t dislike it because it’s instapoetry — actually, I think that’s kinda cool, in that it makes poetry accessible to different people, and it’s written and enjoyed by people who might not have written or enjoyed poetry in more “traditional” formats.
Personally, I didn’t connect that much with Rupi Kaur’s poetry: it’s certainly easy to read, and I kinda liked the way it was matched with sketches that expressed something about each poem. She does have a way of putting things sometimes that puts something stark and horrible out there (particularly in the early section where sexual assault is a major theme) in a way that’s very clear and just… encapsulates a dreadful moment. For the most part, though, I didn’t find her poetry really got to me: it tends to the simple, clear, freeform style, and in a way it sometimes just feels like reading her disjointed thoughts — which is not my thing, much as it’s a valid way of self-expression and of playing with words even when those aren’t your actual thoughts (important not to assume the two are always the same).
Overall, not for me, though I understand the appeal.
Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)
Tags: book reviews, books, poetry, Rupi Kaur
