Hiram Poetry Review – Spring 2005

It always makes me happy to see a long-running literary magazine still going strong.

It always makes me happy to see a long-running literary magazine still going strong. Hiram Poetry Review is in its 39th year, and for a magazine devoted entirely to poetry that should signal something. Most of the poems in this issue are written in a confessional style with a strong first-person presence. Shane McCrae’s “Immunity” deals with the timeless subject of lost love (“I’ve built up an immunity / to knife wounds as well / as that photograph of Mussolini’s corpse you so admire”). E. R. Carlin offers up a strong poem titled “Depleted” with a narrator who looks at procreation as a kind of warfare. Remarkably the woman he is having sex with has zero presence in the poem, which heightens the metaphor. It is humorous, affecting and sexual, three words that could describe a good deal of the poems here. [The Hiram Poetry Review, P.O. Box 162, Hiram, Ohio 44234. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $9. http://home.hiram.edu/www/english/hpr/] – Lincoln Michel