Peter Gizzi Burning Deck ($10) by Ruth Andrews Something must be moving at incredible speed. With pure speed I address you, reality. —Peter Gizzi, "Tous les matins du monde" Peter Gizzi was much lauded—deservedly—for the publication, last year, of the collected lectures of Jack Spicer, which he edited. Unfortunately, his own work as a poet […]

Harry Martinson Story Line Press Translated by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjoberg by Alan DeNiro Poetry in the science fiction genre is almost uniformly putrid—as if Ogden Nash became an engineer but still wanted to keep up with the muse. And, truth be told, much of the poetry dealing with speculative science from the "literary" […]

C. D. Wright Copper Canyon Press ($14) by Mark Nowak “If I were not here; and I am alien; a bodyless eye; this would never have existence in human perception." So writes James Agee ("a spy, traveling as a journalist") about midway through Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book (and a comment) central to any […]

Forrest Gander New Directions Press ($12.95) by Peter Gurnis Take a look at Sally's Mann's haunting photograph on the cover: the surface of water full of light, dark tree-lined banks, branches etched in somber clarity. If we look intently, we lose ourselves, as if staring at something forbidden. The surface has a kind of luminous […]

Doug Rice Cyber-Psychos AOD ($5) by Emily Streight With his last book, a delicious obscenity called Blood of Mugwump: A Tiresian Tale of Incest, Doug Rice inadvertently became the poster-boy for writers who use dirty words; the book's publisher had received NEA funding, which prompted certain U.S. senators to decry arts funding as loudly as possible. […]

Barbara Hodgson Chronicle Books ($22.95) by Rachel Pollack The Sensualist fulfills its title first and foremost in the physical book itself—beautiful to look at and to hold, with the cover, dust jacket, and even endpapers a field of enigmatic illustrations. On a small card pasted onto the cover is a skeleton and the book's subtitle: "A […]

Ken Kalfus Washington Square Press ($16) by Christopher M. Worth Ken Kalfus brings together in this collection a stunning variety of places, times and characters, weaving a rich and complex picture of the human soul in its most vulnerable predicament—being out of place. Kalfus's protagonists find themselves far from home, returning home, and divided between […]

Manlio ArguetaTranslated by Edward Waters Hood Curbstone Press ($14.95) by Susan Swartwout The logistics of conducting a wartime love affair are seldom more orchestratable or romantic than "Your place, or mine?" Yet in this innovative, political novel, Manlio Argueta creates the poignancy and desperation of two lovers caught in El Salvador's deadly civil strife. In […]

Alison Bechdel Firebrand Books ($10.95) by Pat Carlin Everybody's favorite dykes are back, and better than ever. For years now the savvy cartoonist Alison Bechdel has been chronicling the lives of this lesbian community as they make their way through a world of stress, work, death, and taxes—in short, the world everybody has to deal […]

Robert Christgau Harvard University Press ($29.95) by Brian Beatty These days, everybody fancies himself a critic. The dangerous among the legion subscribe to the "rock & roll nigger" aesthetic—perhaps best personified by the late, oft-sainted Lester Bangs. Writing as if hunkered in the trenches alongside their subjects, fighting a culture war vs. a brutal, apathetic […]