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From Mary C. Flinn, editor of 64 and New Virginia Review:
“Joshua Poteat’s meditation on the moon ‘Just for You’ (Juliet’s “inconstant moon, that monthly changes”) takes one of poetry’s most familiar and enduring topics and gives it a fresh spin. His tools are those that make for good poems: concrete, sensual, surprising details. Watch for this new voice; Poteat’s new work is ambitious, distinctive, and full of promise.”
From Sima Rabinowitz, Literary Magazine Reviews
There is much fine work in this issue of Hunger Mountain, but for my taste the most memorable poem in the issue is the Ruth Stone Prize winner, Joshua Poteat’s "From J.G. Heck’s 1851 Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science." Poteat draws striking verbal illustrations of seven visual illustrations from the natural sciences, rendered in precise, lyrical, and authentic detail.
From Dislocate, literary journal of University of Minnesota
Ornithologies, by Joshua Poteat, is full of the beautiful, the lyric, the narrative—many times all at once. How can you not dig a six-part poem titled, "Meditations in the Margins of the Book of Irish Curses"? His writing/syntax/all-that-jazz is hypnotic. Like York's work, Poteat's is of the earth, and not necessarily a comforting one. Familiar? Yes. Sweetly sad? Check. But bucolic? I guess if you consider slaughterhouses and asylums and ghosts bucolic. The world is a textured place, even the parts that don't see much light.
From The Stone Orchard, online poetry review
The poems in Joshua Poteat’s Ornithologies gently tell the truth by meshing the physical with the spiritual and leaving plenty of room for us to ponder, without despair, the corporeal inconsequentiality of all that we think ours. This collection will make a good supplement to meditation on any given day; I’m partial to saving it for a warm, blue-skied afternoon in a hammock.
From Lemon Hound, online poetry review
In particular, out of all the poets in this issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, I like Joshua Poteat, whom I've never heard of, but there is space in his work. It isn't all jammed together with the seamless, hyper-polished quality of much of the tightly spun quatrains or couplets we see in most of these journals. "Illustrating how to catch and manufacture ghosts" is a great title, and the poem itself was engaging:
"Tonight there is no wind, even the heat
is on its knees, and the moths laying eggs"
Now, I'm suspicious of these "ah, moments" in poetry. So much of what is being published seems designed to illicit such responses. Shouldn't the fact that Oprah has all but copyrighted such responses tell us something about the manufactured nature of such responses? (I have witnessed some of the nations powerhouse editors go weak at the knees at lines such as this...)
But Poteat makes fresh this desire, it seems to me, as the poem continues:
"on the side door are not being honest
with themselves. Though their enterprise
is beauty, the eggs will not last through
the rains, and so it goes."
But even as I trace the poems movement here, what seemed pleasing at first glance becomes less so: we again learn how failed hope is, and though we are not left here, on the safe confines of a front porch, chardonnay in hand, we are left with the impotence of desire, our vain delusions...perhaps a more pungent "awe moment" than many of the poems of this variety.
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