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The Scent of Light

Kristjana GunnarsCoach House Books ($25.95) by Dashiel Carrera                             Kristjana Gunnars’s The Scent of Light is a work unyielding in its sensuality, uniquely attuned to the slippery nature of reading in the Information Age. In five autofictive novellas, Gunnars waxes on everything from her homelands of Iceland and Canada to train track romance, weaving together images […]

Defining Language

Three Native American Poets Dark TrafficJoan Naviyuk KaneUniversity of Pittsburgh Press ($18) All This TimeCedar SigoWave Books ($18) Toledo Rez & Other MythsThomas ParrieThat Painted Horse Press: A Borderless Indigenous Press of the Americas ($20) by Nancy Beauregard In Joan Naviyuk Kane’s latest collection, Dark Traffic, the poet addresses the brutality of colonization and its […]

Mumbai Traps: Collected Plays

Anju MakhijaDhauli Books (₹595) by Rochelle Potkar Readers familiar with Anju Makhija’s crisp and sharply-observant poetry will find that as a playwright, she is gumptious, experimental, piercing, and clutter-breaking. In Mumbai Traps: Collected Plays, her vision is that of a director, and her characters shine against the backdrop of India’s largest city, with all its […]

The Fruit Thief and Quiet Places

The Fruit ThiefPeter HandkeFarrar, Straus and Giroux ($28) Quiet Places: Collected EssaysPeter HandkeFarrar, Straus and Giroux ($30 ) by John Toren Though he burst onto the scene half a century ago with confrontational theatrical works on the order of Offending the Audience, and slim, visceral, Hamsun-esque narratives like The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, […]

WILL ALEXANDER

Wednesday, November 16, 5:30 pm CentralVirtual Event: Register Here Rain Taxi welcomes legendary California poet Will Alexander to celebrate the publication of his newest book, Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane), being published as Number 63 in the famed City Lights Pocket Poets Series. Like so much of Alexander’s work, this latest volley travels a path […]

The Diary of Others

The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin Edited by Paul HerronSky Blue Press ($22) by Robert Zaller           The diary is a literary genre beloved in Europe, and particularly in France, where Anaïs Nin came of age in the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s. The daughter of Cuban parents, Nin had begun a private diary in […]

The Golden Dot

Gregory CorsoEdited by Raymond Foye & George ScrivaniLithic Press ($20) by Gregory Stephenson Reflecting on the poetry of the late Gregory Corso (1930 – 2001), the phrase “internal combustion” comes to mind: compression, auto-ignition, energy. (Fittingly, his second and perhaps most famous collection of poems was titled Gasoline.) And indeed, Corso’s work arose from a […]

Till the Wheels Fall Off

Brad ZellarCoffee House Press ($17.95) by Frank Randall I met Brad Zellar, fittingly, via cassette, at the dawn of the 1990s, in one of the dozens of Minneapolis duplexes that housed aspiring bands at the time. Minneapolis was a city that managed to amplify its talent far beyond expectations for a town of its size, […]

Star Lake

Arda CollinsThe Song Cave ($18.95) by Dobby Gibson “Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life,” wrote C.D. Wright. She could have been addressing the work of Arda Collins, an aeronaut of inner weathers whose poetry sounds like no one […]

Morton Feldman

Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde Ryan DohoneyBloomsbury ($29.95) by Patrick James Dunagan Ryan Dohoney’s Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde explores how the composer’s work was both derived from and sustained by his early friendships in the 1950s Abstract Expressionist scene in New York City. Dahoney gives special […]