REVIEW: “The Experience Machine” by Mark Dimaisip

Review of Mark Dimaisip, “The Experience Machine,” Radon Journal 9 (2025): 62-63 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Kudos to the editors for placing Dimaisip’s poem immediately after Whalbring’s poem reviewed here: In this ordering, Dimaisip’s reads like a sequel to Whalbring’s. If the latter poem offers up a potential future, the former provides us with a singular, specific, concrete reality of that future.

I’m not sure how I would’ve reacted to this poem on its own, but in read conjunction with the other one, I really liked it.

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REVIEW: “Aging is a Word That Means ‘Slowly Becoming a Machine'” by Marcus Whalbring

Review of Marcus Whalbring, “Aging is a Word That Means ‘Slowly Becoming a Machine’,” Radon Journal 9 (2025): 60-61 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I’ve come to really love and look forward to the poetry selection in each Radon Journal issue; the poems are exceptionally curated and there’s always at least one in every issue that is really, really good. In this issue, that poem is this one: Gorgeous and raw and aching and honest. I loved it.

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REVIEW: “The World Ends With a Whimper” by Nicholas De Marino

Review of Nicholas De Marino, “The World Ends With a Whimper,” Radon Journal 9 (2025): 59 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

When one starts off their piece with a call-back to such an iconic poem, it sets the reader’s expectations high. While the poem was a strong one (cleverly constructed so it could be read in multiple ways), I’m not sure the title helped rather than hindered it, especially as the title was also the opening line. I wonder what the poem would’ve been like if instead of setting things up to repeat an idea, the title was instead used to introduce something new and unexpected?

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