I reviewed Nathalie Handal's disarming Love and Strange Horses in Issue 17 of Poetry International. The ambition of this collection is perhaps the purest that lyric poetry claims, that of music's immediacy. As the poet asks in "The Songmaker—19 Arabics," "Who said we need to be strangers, / when we listen to the same music?"
More than any other journal, Poetry International surprises me with its panoply of writers. There is always someone, often many someones, new to discover. At $15, this six-hundred page issue of Poetry International is a steal.