Translated by Pierre Joris Inconundrum Press ($11.95) by Dale Smith The translations here form a kind of hieroglyph of 20th-century modernism, a signal of dynamic forces drawing from diverse threads of tradition and cultural interrogation. Written by four masters of European tongues and rendered into English by a masterful translator, this unique gathering contributes to […]
George Bilgere Akron Series in Poetry University of Akron Press ($13.95) by Nicole Trokey Bitterness. Nostalgia. Anger. Love. Humor. Wonder. Many poets have the ability to move smoothly from one of these emotions to the next within a single volume of poetry. But George Bilgere can do it within a single poem, and he demonstrates […]
Michael Farrell Salt Publishing ($12.95) by Aaron McCollough Among younger poets today, the methods for channeling Frank O'Hara are manifold and often quite beautiful. They are seldom as remarkable, however, as the performance Michael Farrell pulls off in ode ode. The book is crammed—that's the only word for it—with language. Elisions and forced breaks, two […]
Heidi Greco Anvil Press ($10) by Nathan G. Thompson In order to understand Heidi Greco's poetry, start with the title of her new book: Rattlesnake Plantain. The pairing of a poisonous snake and a wild plant used to heal burns and stings, it feels like an entire world. Add to this birds, spiders, clouds, angels, […]
Linh Dinh Subpress/Tinfish ($12) by Chris Pusateri One of the basic principles of architecture deals with the division of space: A structure modulates the flow of air, light, and elements, and in doing so, defines how interior space can function. Lessons in structure are not lost on Linh Dinh, whose first book-length collection, All Around […]
Dennis Phillips Green Integer ($10.95) by Deborah Meadows Dennis Phillips's ninth collection of poetry, Sand, is a beautifully sedate work in twenty-one parts beginning with "Prelude" and "Altered Landscape" then concluding with "A Chart Room" and "Clarity." Like many works in the avant-garde aesthetic, there is a tracing of recurrence rather than a developmental journey, […]
Edited by Eliot Weinberger Translated by William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and David Hinton New Directions ($24.95) by Lucas Klein The translator is a servant of two masters, one native and one foreign; Eliot Weinberger, in editing The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, also puts himself at the service […]
Laura Wexler Scribner ($24) by Jack Gilden In the rural Georgia counties of the late 1940s black and white agitation over the red clay produced blizzards of snowy cotton, and black picked it and white paid for it and in the end they dumped it into machines that separated the seeds from the fibers and […]
Barrett Watten Wesleyan University Press ($27.95) by Brent Cunningham The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics is a work of academic literary and cultural theory made up of eight chapters, each an essay Barrett Watten has written over the last ten years. While the specifically Russian version of "Constructivism" does show up periodically […]
Curtis White HarperSanFrancisco ($23.95) by Steve Healey Destined to inspire numerous café debates and become the pop-intellectual scandal of the season, Curtis White's latest book is an enormously ambitious and wide-ranging polemic. Clamoring for more socially engaged imagination in America, he especially scolds those who consume a kind of cultural mediocrity packaged as liberalism lite […]