This review is no slender paperback; Big River Poetry Review Volume 1 is a blockbuster 9 x 12 coffee table book with 185 pages of poems. "A magnificent read," says Joan Colby. THIS IS AS GOOD AS IT GETS. Including poems by Pam Uschuk, Phillip Fried, Joan Colby, William Doreski, Sheila E. Murphy, Peycho Kanev, Sybill Pittman Estess, Larry Thomas, Robert Lietz, Martin Willitts, Jr., and many other outstanding poets, this is the first print issue of Big River Poetry Review, an on-line and print journal of fine original contemporary poetry compiled, edited, and published in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, see bigriverpoetry.com. In this issue, we are printing all the poems we published on-line between the Review's inception in late May 2012 and the end of December 2012.

Poetry. "In reading Casey's poems we ought to remember that poetry often arises from an exhilaration and even an intoxification with the sounds of speech."--Ted Kooser "If poetry were the singular truth of a poet, Casey's MILLRAT would be a masterpiece."--Harvard Review"

The forty-eight poems in Sky Sandwiches echo John F. Buckley’s wry, paradoxical perspective, a point of view evoking both the transcendent and the quotidian, fusing a sky associated with religion and higher yearnings with the sandwiches of simpler sustenance. In his poems as in this world, people fly like crooked arrows, seeking targets both above and below. The collection describes how our desires lead us to absurd hopes and stale resignations, humble dreams and sublime despairs. It recounts the ways we may seek both eternal salvation and a half-decent Italian sub. Parts are tender. Parts are funny. Parts will get stuck in your braces.

A timely new edition of a pioneering work in Latino literature, National Book Award nominee Gary Soto's first collection (originally published in 1977) draws on California's fertile San Joaquin Valley, the people, the place, and the hard agricultural work done there by immigrants. In these poems, joy and anger, violence and hope are placed in both the metaphorical and very real circumstances of the Valley. Rooted in personal experiences—of the poet as a young man, his friends, family, and neighbors—the poems are spare but expansive, with Soto's voice as important as ever. This welcome new edition has been expanded with a crucial selection of complementary poems (some previously unpublished) and a new introduction by the author.

Poetry. "The poems in Sunni Wilkinson's THE MARRIAGE OF THE MOON AND THE FIELD show us history, affection, private struggle, and the common life with a kind of grave, irony-tinged happiness that is rare in the poetry of our time. Her poems turn away from complaint, as though she had set out to reveal instead the domestic life of intelligence in all its color, warmth, and depth. This is a very fine debut volume, worth treasuring; and more are sure to follow."�Christopher Howell "There is much of wonder in a first book of poems: a new voice, a freshness, other ways of being and believing. And so it is with Sunni Brown Wilkinson's THE MARRIAGE OF THE MOON AND THE FIELD. There are marvelous poems here, poems that range through the world: Vienna, Juarez, Andalusia, Mozambique, Venice. The poet tells us 'I've looked into the world and found / my own life reassembled and given back to me / with broken glass and a birdsong.' There are poems of family (parents, children, grandparents), our primal world, and there are poems of immigrants, asylum seekers, the displaced. And weaving through all of them there is a sweet charity, a belief in grace, and a tenderness toward existence. There is as well a recognition that tragedy and loss make up a part of our lives, but in Wilkinson's vision these can be redeemed since 'we're verses with a space in between / for our own small hallelujah.' These are poems that 'you can ride...into tomorrow.' Sunni Wilkinson is a welcome new poet for our times."�Joseph Stroud "Sunni Brown Wilkinson's poems sustain a compelling tension between the macro and micro worlds. Scientific facts of the physical realm collide with intimate interiorities. She turns a steely eye and a tender heart toward the experience of living fully in the rush of the NOW and the flickering echoes of what came before. These are lushly rendered poems to savor and/or to devour."�Nance Van Winckel

Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way.

From the passenger seat of Sean Singer’s taxicab, we witness New York’s streets livid and languid with story and contemplation that give us awareness and aliveness with each trip across the asphalt and pavement. Laced within each fare is an illumination of humanity’s intimate music, of the poet’s inner journey—a signaling at each crossroad of our frailty and effervescence. This is a guidebook toward a soundscape of higher meaning, with the gridded Manhattan streets as a scoring field. Jump in the back and dig the silence between the notes that count the most in each unique moment this poet brings to the page. “Sean Singer’s radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman’s, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is. In this way his books are startlingly alive... I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer’s jazzy curation as I move from page to page. Today in the Taxi is threaded through with quotes from Kafka, facts about jazz musicians, musings from various thinkers, from a Cathar fragment to Martin Buber to Arthur Eddington to an anonymous comedian. The taxi is at once a real taxi and the microcosm of a world—at times the speaker seems almost like Charon ferrying his passengers, as the nameless from all walks and stages of life step in and out his taxi. I am reminded of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn... Today in the Taxi is intricate, plain, suggestive, deeply respectful of the reader, and utterly absorbing. Like Honey and Smoke before it, which was one of the best poetry books of the last decade, this is work of the highest order.” —Laurie Sheck

Poetry. "THE BOOK OF SHARKS is an accomplishment at the micro and macro level. Rob Carney has crafted lines that you'll want to save for your next tattoo inside of efficient poems that touch on creation myth, forgotten industries, and slices of life in villages he manufactures with a creator's divine spark. All of this works on its own inside of a larger, complex quilt that he has woven into an intricate pattern that revisits themes, finishes stories, and reminds you that THE BOOK OF SHARKS is a larger poem that is greater than just its sharpened teeth."--Jesse Parent "In precise, sharp lines, Rob Carney's THE BOOK OF SHARKS builds and interrogates myth and myth-makers, turning to sharks to also turn inward and outward, exploring one's purpose and place and the stories one tells to make meaning. Here, poems wash out and return like the tides they describe, inviting the reader to feel their weight, as if 'to disappear under the stories / as though they were waves.' In the end, whether in water, sky, or story, Carney invites us to consider the essential motivation of 'moving, arriving, being full,' what it means to seek."--Callista Buchen "'Some say sharks are the ocean's anger at us for being in its future,' writes Rob Carney. I say poems are sharks' way of forgiving us for the soup, the necklaces, the movies, and the mascots. And, let's not even mention climate change. Rob Carney's trenchant, probing poems circle around the self, not so much sensing blood but, perhaps even more dangerously, searching for understanding. Part confession, part documentation, part meditation, these smartly crafted lyrics explore how and why we have and have not allowed sharks (metaphors for so many things) to swim into our lives. This is a major effort from a talented poet."--Dean Rader "In his ambitious collection, THE BOOK OF SHARKS, Rob Carney reimagines the human world and facets of contemporary society by creating a mythology and origin story that correct the erroneous legend of sharks. In building a new lens through which to view the sea and its most vilified species, Carney opens up a new way to conceive of art, life, storytelling, and the connections among living creatures in the sea, on land, and among the stars. 'Some say sharks are the ocean's anger,' he repeats in two poems, and later--as the collection evolves--they become 'the ocean's blueprint.' In this collection, comprised of seven sections, containing seven poems each, Carney weds structure and symbolism to reinforce his creation myth; correction and etymology to reconfigure historical facts; and repetition of images and phrases to place these poems--all without titles, bleeding poignantly into one another as part of an ongoing narrative or interconnected species--in the epic tradition. Here we are offered a sympathetic view of sharks, an alternative way to see constellations and their corresponding myths, and a new foundation from which to begin our lives and our stories. Carney's speaker demands that we reexamine what is actually dangerous versus what's been stereotyped so, and most of all he begs us to see ourselves new, 'to bear in mind / we aren't the measure of Creation. Just a part.'"--Lisa Fay Coutley