Jaimee Hills

if this world falls apart By Lou Lipsitz Lynx House Press 80 pp. Lou Lipsitz next reads at McIntyre’s Fine Books at Fearrington Village on Sunday, May 22, at 2 p.m. as part of the N.C. Poetry Series. He will be joined by Diana Pinckney and Robert Abbate. The title poem of if this world […]

Living Above the Frost Line By Nancy Simpson Carolina Wren Press; 104 pp. In her poem “Argument with My Mother,” North Carolina poet Nancy Simpson describes autumn with brilliant brushstrokes: “My passion/ was the psychedelia of scarlet maples/ flashing on the mountainsides.” The older woman prefers springtime: “I don’t like fall./ Trees are shedding tears.” […]

Gospel Earth By Jeffery Beam Skysill Press; 246 pp. Local poet Jeffery Beam’s latest collection, Gospel Earth, carves out a place for itself in the long tradition of nature poetry as a spiritual treatise concerning the natural world. If the earth is a gospel to be read, the poet has scoured its lush verdant verse […]

Veins By Larry Johnson WordTech; 112 pp. Raleigh poet Larry Johnson’s first collection, titled Veins, contains elegies to poets and portraits of ancient figures, as well as elements of a more personal history. Connecting these disparate lives are veins, the metaphor that flows throughout the book. From the rush of excitement in the veins brought […]

Hailed as an “ongoing magnum opus,” Joseph Donahue’s most recent book of poetry, Terra Lucida, reads like an apocalyptic vision. Donahue, a highly regarded poet who is a senior lecturer at Duke University, published Terra Lucida earlier this year, but it’s really the latest in a two-decade-long saga. The book begins, “Rivers & cities/swept clear […]

Shadow Box By Fred Chappell Louisiana State University Press, 96 pp. Shadow Box, Fred Chappell’s latest, formally fascinating collection of poems, contains poems within poems, doubling your money’s worth and doubling your rhymes with poems that demand to be read and read again. In each of these poems a smaller poem haunts the larger, pointing […]

Spill By Michael Chitwood Tupelo Press, 72 pp. Michael Chitwood’s Spill grapples with the spiritual, finding it in uncommon places, especially in the commonplace and everyday. For Chitwood, it is spirituality that unifies his diversity of subjects, from the small life of a tick on a bat to the large faith of a man in […]