BY DALLAS WOODBURN
To borrow (shamelessly) a simile from Forrest Gump beginning a Jess Row story is like sampling from a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to bite into. In his most recent collection, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, the title story centers around a young woman struggling to come to terms with the death of her fiancé in 9/11. Another story, “Amritsar,” is written from the perspective of a middle-aged Sikh immigrant learning to fish from his son, who is planning to marry a white American girl. Row’s O. Henry and Pushcart-Prize-winning story “Sheep May Safely Graze” centers around a federal bureaucrat during the Reagan administration, grieving over the death of his young daughter in a freak boating accident at summer camp. The stories in Nobody Ever Gets Lost take …MORE
If Harold Ramis, in Dr. Egon Spengler’s infinite wisdom, has taught us anything it is this, that 1) print is dead 2) collecting molds, spores, and fungus can be a fun and exciting hobby, and 3) ghosts need busting. Then the ‘90s reared their slightly less fuzzy head, and Demi and Swayze showed us the tender side of ghosts—that some ghosts just want to make sweet, clay hand-love to us. Matthew Rohrer’s Destroyer and Preserver is the first collection of poetry to make sweet, clay hand-love to me in a long time, albeit less sloppy.
Before Matthew Zapruder’s Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon Press) started haunting my bookshelf last fall I caught a couple blips on the old poetry-ghost detector: the apparition of poet-as-little-girl appearing and disappearing through the walls of the tightly-contained sections in Julia Story’s Post Moxie (Sarabande Books, 2010), and the disarmingly honest ectoplasmic-robot speaker in Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine (Caketrain Books, 2010), so aware of his organs, origins, and his wires. Ghosts walk among us, or float. And if 2010 kicked off the ghost craze in American Poetry, 2011 is poised to become the Year of the 
In the opening pages of Bartók’s memoir, as she faces the impending death of her long-estranged mother, Bartók explains that she has become more like this woman than she ever could have dreamed. Having suffered a serious brain injury from a car accident seven years before, Bartók also finds herself overwhelmed by stimuli and often unable to perform simple life tasks or remember events in her life, even from a few hours earlier. Her own unpolished writing, she says, is random and disjointed, very much like the work she later finds in notebooks that harbored the thoughts of her mother.
morning haiku is a testament to Sonia Sanchez’ perpetual offering of herself as she honors others and delivers her truths for devoted readers who have followed her since her revolutionary beginnings as a Black Power artist/activist and Black Studies creator. Sanchez’ utilization of a deceivingly simple poetic form is actually her self-pronounced homecoming to herself. Her personal connection to this short literary form, which she describes as a form that “make[s] you slow down and check out what’s happening in your life” began decades ago in a book store in New York City (morning haiku xiv). Sanchez grants recognition to social justice greats, including a set of haiku’s entitled For Freedom Sisters which honor an entourage of black women legends. Within this section we see her tenacity to the beauty and existence of powerful black womanhood:
