State Sonnets

by B.J. Best

Poetry. In STATE SONNETS, B.J. Best takes the venerable poetic form on a road trip, speeding down highways of romance, regret, longing, and sex on a tour that lustily wanders into a collection of fourteen-line postcards--pushpins that map the arcs and angles of love and travel.

Genres: Poetry

56 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

B.J. Best is the author of three books of poetry: But Our Princess Is in Another Castle (Rose Metal Press, 2013), State Sonnets (sunnyoutside, 2009), and Birds of Wisconsin (New Rivers Press, 2010), winner of the Many Voices Project competition and an Outstanding Achievement in Poetry award from the Wisconsin Library Association. He has also published three chapbooks with Centennial Press, most recently Drag: Twenty Short Poems about Smoking, as well as numerous poems in literary magazines, including Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Nimrod, North American Review, Pleiades, Quarterly West, and Sentence. He holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and is an Assistant Professor of English at Carroll University. He has twice been a finalist to serve as Wisconsin's Poet Laureate, and serves on the editorial board for Verse Wisconsin.

Reviews

[Leah Angstman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a decent selection of sonnets about traveling through the states (and apparently Canada is a state, too, because there are several Canadian province poems?) and exploring relationships as well as landscapes. There's nothing mind-blowing here, but the travelogue is interesting and has a couple great lines sprinkled throughout, dabbling in states of mind and heart as often as states of the country, in all its myriad definitions.

[Cynthia Reeser]

Review here: http://www.prickofthespindle.com/revi...

[Cathryn Cofell · Rating 5 out of 5]

BJ is the BEST!