Reviews

Lessons with Scissors is Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s fifth book, and this is old home week for many of its poems, which came out first in The Manhattan Review. She has also seen her verse play acted on the stage and is a visual artist known for collages and assemblages—an interest which shows up in the book as “Bebe Marie” where Joseph Cornell’s doll figure gets inside a viewer’s brain.

Peter Krumbach’s book of prose poems, already adorned with the Antivenom Poetry Award from Denver’s Elixir Press, sits at the axis of two poles—Czechoslovakia and surrealism. Krumbach left Czechoslovakia long ago and has lived in Southern California for 25 years, but he was born in Brno and stayed long enough to earn a degree in Visual Arts.