E-Reviews

We’ve decided to switch to all electronic reviews in favor of publishing them in print issues of Rattle, where, due to spatial limitations, we were only able to include about 10-15 each year. This forced the guidelines of those reviews to be very specific in terms of length, made it impossible to review chapbooks and prose, and meant that a lot of worthy and interesting reviews just didn’t fit. This poses a particularly difficult problem in the poetry community, where advertising is virtually non-existent—you can’t turn on your TV or drive past a billboard and chance upon an ad for a poetry book, and while there are a few opportunities in print advertising, most poets can’t afford that. Without reviews or hearing about them through word-of-mouth, how do you find new poets?

In response, we offer the E-Review forum. Almost anything goes here—reviews can be very brief or very long, they can be high praise or healthy criticism. If you read a book and you have a reaction, write up a review and send it in. We encourage the personal narrative in particular (see this note). We’ll screen for content and quality, and we won’t be able to put everything online, but if you have something useful to say, that others might want to hear, we will. Just follow the guidelines here, or request a book from this list. And if you’re just looking for a good book, go ahead and browse.

New in the Last Month

Garrison, David Lee – Playing Bach on the D.C. Metro
Marks, Janet – I Wanted a City
Gillan, Maria Mazziotti – Writing Poetry to Save Your Life
Pepper, Patric – Zoned Industrial
Stallings, A.E. – Olives
The Death of King Arthur: A New Verse Translation

E-Reviews by Book Author