Tag Archives: fall 2011

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY

Tod Davies Exterminating Angel Press ($13) by Marjorie Hakala While it is not explicitly aimed at any age group, Snotty Saves the Day is mostly a middle grade adventure fantasy wrapped in a faux academic study. In the foreword, Tod Davies claims to have found the manuscript in the woods with a note from a professor in […]

I’LL GET THERE. IT BETTER BE WORTH THE TRIP. — 40th Anniversary Edition

John Donovan Flux ($9.95) by Shawn Patrick Doyle Since few books are ever released in a 40th Anniversary Edition, John Donovan’s I’ll get there. It better be worth the trip. must be considered foundational and timeless. This new edition is packaged with two reflective essays by Bret Hartinger and Martin Wilson, who touchingly relay their own experiences […]

LAST SEEN ENTERING THE BILTMORE: Plays, Short Fiction, Poems 1975–2010

Gary Indiana Semiotext(e) ($17.95) by Justin Maxwell It’s easy to like Gary Indiana. Any successful novelist who steps up and says “plot is the sleaziest form of ingenuity” has thought through the writer’s craft far enough to be worth reading. And this collection’s thirty-five-year coverage is a strong starting point for anyone unfamiliar with the […]

TALKING INTO THE EAR OF A DONKEY

Robert Bly W. W. Norton ($24.95) by Mark Gustafson “Oh, on an early morning I think I shall live forever!” —Robert Bly, “Poem in Three Parts” In the morning of his career, Robert Bly’s first book, Silence in the Snowy Fields (Wesleyan University Press, 1962), became the touchstone of a new generation. Forging a poetic link between […]

DEEPENING GROOVE

Ravi Shankar National Poetry Review Press ($17.95) by Ralph Pennel Editor's Note: The book under review contains some poems originally published in Seamless Matter: Thirty Stills, a chapbook published by Rain Taxi's OHM Editions. Ravi Shankar’s Deepening Groove reminds us that, “the more things change, the more they stay the same” . . . and that, of this notion, […]

THE LAST USABLE HOUR

Deborah Landau Copper Canyon Press ($15) by Nick DePascal Deborah Landau’s second collection of poetry, The Last Usable Hour, is a sometimes beautiful, sometimes harrowing, sometimes disturbing love letter to a mysterious paramour who may be a person, or New York City, or both. The book’s four sections (each consisting of linked lyrical sequences under a […]

LE SPLEEN DE POUGHKEEPSIE

Joshua Harmon The University of Akron Press ($14.95) by Donna Stonecipher In his essay “Religion as a Cultural System,” the anthropologist Clifford Geertz differentiates between the four major perspectives human beings bring to the world: the religious, the scientific, the common-sense, and the aesthetic. When one views the world via the aesthetic perspective, he writes, […]

EITHER WAY I’M CELEBRATING: Poems and Comics

Sommer Browning Birds, LLC ($16) by Marcus Slease Like Philip Whalen, whose poems all flow along on the same pitch, Sommer Browning displays a lightness of touch amidst multiple forms and approaches in her debut full-length book, Either Way I’m Celebrating. The heights are in the ephemeral, the world as it passes by moment to moment. […]

WITTGENSTEIN’S ANTIPHILOSOPHY

Alain Badiou translated by Bruno Bosteels Verso ($24.95) by Jeremy Butman After a century of what some might call abuse—beginning with Nietzsche’s anti-Platonism and ending with Derrida’s deconstruction—in the figure of Alain Badiou philosophy has found a beneficent, avuncular spokesperson. His advocacy ranges from the polemical to the invocative, and his celebrated, grounding text, Being and […]

AFTER CANAAN: Essays on Race, Writing and Region

Wayde Compton Arsenal Pulp Press ($18.95) by Paula Koneazny Canadian poet and spoken-word/turntable artist Wayde Compton's first collection of essays explores complicated issues of race, identity and language. Indeed, the conjunction of literary innovation and language of and about race is something Compton knows a great deal about. In fact, Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary credit Compton as having coined […]