Train Ride to Bucharest by Lucia Cherciu: Reviewed by Cameron MacKenzie

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"The image of the weaver provides the metaphor for the collection entire, as the poems collected here are less freestanding pieces than they are snatches of visions, ideas worked upon, words posited in one poem to be taken up again in another and explored. Plums, berries, brandy and frozen solid trees appear and reappear rhythmically throughout the collection, often tied to the traditions of life the narrator has by now left behind."

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Loplop in a Red City by Kenneth Pobo: Reviewed by Cameron MacKenzie

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"The triumphs of Pobo’s ekphrastic texts lie less in any consonant relationship between the given poem and the artwork than in the dissonant collisions sparked by the art and extended through the poetry. In the collection’s best moments, it’s as though Pobo’s language leaps out beyond the artwork to another plane altogether—a plane that nevertheless feels as though it was prepared by the artwork itself."

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The Ghost of Birds by Eliot Weinberger: Reviewed by Cameron MacKenzie

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Happy was I then to learn of a new publication from Eliot Weinberger, The Ghosts of Birds, in which Weinberger continues in the vein he nearly pioneered and certainly owns, that of the avant-garde essay. While this book might offer distraction from the tumultuous present, it immerses its reader into a wider scope of time that proves no less convulsive, ecstatic or ultimately mysterious

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