On "Men, Women and Chainsaws" by Joy Wood, "Traveling East" by Kelly Lenox, and "Captions" by Scott Garson *****

There's something mysteriously disturbing about Joy Wood's poem on the connection between cutting things (fear) and joy, between men and women. But it is those connections that we don't see otherwise that poetry is often put to use to make, to make us rethink. Read the poem here at Elimae.

Given the brevity of many a poem (and generally speaking the poems I like most), a single extended metaphor will often do. And that is certainly the case with Kelly Lenox's "Traveling East," which draws some interesting parallels between the sun and a lover. But how what makes this poem work well comes in what it suggests in the last couple of lines. Read the poem here at Summerset Review.

Garson's "Captions" is a exactly what the title states--a collections of captions from photos we can't see. I never thought a set of captions, sans pictures, could be so evocative and personal, but Garson does it. He makes me want to get out the old yearbooks and cut out the pictures and just read the cutlines. Would they be more interesting? A former yearbook caption writer, somehow I doubt it--we agonized over those things, and they were rarely as good as these. Read the captions here at Elimae.