Dan Gerber Copper Canyon Press ($16) by George Kalamaras Dan Gerber has always been a quietly magnificent poet. From his earliest book, 1971’s The Revenant, to his remarkable new collection, Sailing through Cassiopeia, Gerber’s poetry is a poetry of respect. One thinks of Chinese poets of antiquity who emphasize seeing “the world of the ten thousand […]

Grant Loveys ECW Press ($18.95) by Erick Piller While the title of award-winning fiction writer Grant Loveys’s first book of poetry, Our Gleaming Bones Unrobed, calls to mind the tough, disembodied structure that underlies experience, it also suggests, by a trick of opposites, the body that enrobes this structure and obscures its luminescence. This paradox runs […]

Annie Finch Wesleyan University Press ($30) by Bethany Rose Prosseda Annie Finch’s Spells is an aptly named compilation of poems, performance pieces, poetic dramas, and verse translations written by the author over the past forty years. Deeply inspired by the feminist movement of the 1970s and the incantatory quality of language, Finch’s collection engages in a conversation […]

Moira Egan Passager Books ($14) by Heidi Czerwiec I bought Hot Flash Sonnets assuming it was a sequel to the anthology coedited by Moira Egan, Hot Sonnets (Entasis Press, 2011), a collection of sexy sonnets about and by women. It both is and isn’t: though these poems are all Egan’s, the title, perspective, and style evoke the anthology. Yet […]

by Paul McRandle Surrealism in the United States has a labyrinthine and explosive history. Forced into an uneasy exile in New York City by the ravages of the Second World War, the group around André Breton (including Max Ernst, Luis Buñuel, Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, and Marcel Duchamp) managed to pull together major exhibits and […]