A round-up of seven new books by Adrienne Chung, Danielle Cadena Deulan, C. S. Giscombe, Shane McCrae, Diane Mehta, Romeo Oriogun, and Simon West begins in this way:
“Do not despise your inner world,” the philosopher Martha Nussbaum advises, recommending literature and the arts because they offer “a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world.” The many ways in which poets construct their inner worlds and emotional lives are on pleasurable display in this month’s poetry books.
Romeo Oriogun strips his eloquent verse of embellishment, as if the agony of exile has led him to a back-to-basics moral reckoning, since “only language can begin the restoration / of those pushed out of history.” Diane Mehta employs a heightened diction (“lovepromises,” “neighborhoodilogical malaise”) that arises from her desire to capture “so many angled ways of being.” Shane McCrae’s style is plainspoken yet fractured and allusive, reflecting a difficult inner voyage to meaning: “How far we travel now to be / In the now impossible presence of things….”
Go to Literary Hub to see the reviews here.
