THE LOVELY YELLOW FIELD

a literary/arts journal out of Buffalo, N.Y., just gave THE AWAKENING a mini-review in its issue #7.  Thank you Edric Mesmer.  It's brief enough so I'll replicate in full here:

THE AWAKENING
Review By Edric Mesmer

Four meditations: spoofing on and getting off the modernist obsession with erotic contagion; dispatches from 9/11 for the poem that refuses to be written; the kaleidoscopic universality of pain as it dejectedly finds representation; a consideration of artwork by Filipino-American artist jenifer k. wofford. All these seeding our inheritances. The syphilitic metonym for a sexually-driven modernism is mirthful in its moves between hard-line phallocentrism and a lyrically-loaded vocab: “When I wish to soar from / the surface of words, I do not think of ‘Ezra Pound,’ // ‘penis,’ or ‘anus.’ I think of azure, kimono, aprocito, / adobe, Angkor Wat, magenta, anvil, silver moth …” From here there is a concentrated shift from the literarily investigative to the poetry of witness. Emails from September 2001 (incidentally, the author’s birthday) cohere in an antipoetic missive of community, synthesizing pathos. Ultimately, the collection must look at that which does not easily bear witness, as the many atrocities of modern poverty configure a media that cannot be or will not be televised. The poem becomes that televisionary channel-surfing: “… American press don’t buy these kinds of pictures. / Other countries do.’)” bleeds stringently back into triadic line. “Who determines what / leaves us / speechless? // Who—there is / a Who!— / determines // what’s allowed?”

Hope that tickles your interest into checking out moi book!  It's asleep until a reader wakes it!