Book One: A Good and Decent Man C. Tyler Fantagraphics ($24.99) by Ken Chen Refuting Paradise Lost, Virginia Woolf wrote: “The substance of Milton is all made of wonderful, beautiful and masterly descriptions . . . He deals in horror and immensity and squalor and sublimity but never in the passions of the human heart. Has […]
Joshua Dysart and Alberto Ponticelli Vertigo/DC Comics ($9.99) by Spencer Dew In the final pages of this disquieting and enthralling book, journalist Momolu Sengendo confronts a man whose face is wrapped in blood-stained bandages, insisting that “violence answered with violence” offers no hope and no end. The journalist, whose task is to report on the […]
David Mazzucchelli Pantheon Books ($29.95) by Britt Aamodt Asterios Polyp is David Mazzucchelli's first graphic novel—a surprising fact considering the artist’s many years in the field. He has been drawing comics since the early 1980s, and has collaborated on such high-profile projects as Daredevil and Batman: Year One (both written by Frank Miller) and an adaptation of Paul […]
Peter Jaeger Reality Street Editions (£9.50) by Chris Pusateri To mention dreams in the age of postmodernism seems curiously anachronistic. As a means for creating poetry, dreams have more in common with older forms of creative practice than with anything contemporary. The word evokes modernist and early postwar experiments—everything from Freud’s psychoanalysis to Breton’s mining […]
Ryszard Kapuściński translated by Kiana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba Biblioasis ($16.95) by Amy Groshek Here in the U.S. we are a guilty nation, and as such, we like our Eastern European poets with a hearty helping of angst. More exactly, we fetishize the suffering of those who weathered Nazi and Soviet occupations. The more horrible […]
Pablo Neruda translated by William O’Daly Copper Canyon Press ($15) by John Bradley Oh, the lie that we lived became our daily bread. What we, lords of the twenty-first century, did not know must be known, must be seen, the dissent and the why, because we did not see, so that no one else consumes […]
Rae Armantrout Wesleyan University Press ($22.95) by Todd Pederson This is the age of hyperbole: fragments of pop culture quarrel for our attentions as conflicting messages land like rain. Amid the contradictions and noisy exaggerations, our suspicions become necessary agencies of preservation. In this commercial world with so little one can trust, reservation is more […]
John Graber Blue Begonia Press ($15) by Emilio DeGrazia John Graber has traveled a long road to his first collection,Thanksgiving Dawn. After taking his undergraduate degree from St. Olaf’s College in 1968, he entered the Iowa Writers Workshop and studied with many of the bright lights there, including famed mentor Marvin Bell. He subsequently frequented […]
Brandon Shimoda Flim Forum Press ($14) by Craig Santos Perez Brandon Shimoda’s The Alps begins with a single line on an otherwise blank page: “HOW will I ever find the scenery.” This question reverberates throughout the book for both the poet and the reader as the physical and emotional landscape of the Alps moves in and out […]
Yusef Komunyakaa Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($14) by Miguel Murphy In Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, war is depicted as the fundamental drive of the human species, no less a part of the natural order than the sunset. “Before man was,” McCarthy writes, “war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”Warhorses, Yusef Komunyakaa’s most […]