Thomas E. Kennedy Wynkin deWorde (£21.72) by Linda Lappin Thomas E. Kennedy, an American writer based in Denmark, has just come forth with the second volume of his Copenhagen Quartet. This ambitious and multifaceted project follows on the modernist tradition of novels celebrating the spirit of the world's great cities, with their many moods and […]
Robert Glück Clear Cut Press ($12.95) by Gail Scott For me, the arbitrary status of The Review as respected judgment based on common notions of value seems disingenuous. Reading is a conversation, a dance, and the music in our reading-heads a potpourri of the cultural, historical space we read from—and toward. I will say right […]
John Barth Houghton Mifflin ($24) by Alicia L. Conroy The world of letters would be noticeably more tame without John Barth—erudite, playful, enamored of adolescent sexual punning, foot soldier in the vanguard of postmodernism. We have come to expect that he will tilt at windmills for us, wake us from complacency with a cold splash […]
Clumsy Top Shelf Productions ($10) Unlikely Top Shelf Productions ($14.95) Jeffrey Brown by Jennifer Przybylski Autobiography is the longtime province of underground comics, and pioneers such as Harvey Pekar, Chester Brown, and Joe Matt alternately bore variations on the discursive, sometimes sour, human condition. Licentious tics, relationship fumbles, and self-loathing are the elements of their […]
Goran Simic Translated by Amela Simic Brick Books ($15) by Gilbert Wesley Purdy On a continent where so much seems assured, the threat of devastation is exotic, shot through with a drama that can hardly be imagined. Consequently, we have long found our more compelling writers in translation and from regions at the edge of […]
Edited by Michael Cross Avenue B Books ($12) by Mark Tursi Akira Kurosawa's film Dreams is an enthralling exploration of humankind's relationship with the imagination and the unconscious, as well as with the natural world, so it's no surprise that eleven cutting-edge poets have paid homage to it in this new anthology, aptly titled Involuntary […]
Eric Baus Verse Press ($12) by Jane Sprague We develop in the space between revolving and breath. In the field of string theory, physicists research the order and organization of the universe on a micro-level. Here, numbers do not adhere to the ordinary rules of mathematics; the sum of three times five is not five […]
Raymond Federman Six Gallery Press/Journal of Experimental Fiction ($9.99) by Karl Krause Jorge Luis Borges's essay "The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader" identifies literature's ability to "become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise." If literature is near death, Raymond Federman's Here and Elsewhere fans […]
Edited by Saadi Simawe and Daniel Weissbort Zephyr Press ($16.95) by Jeffrey C. Alfier Paul Fussell once described British soldier-poet Edmund Blunden's decision to write the autobiography of his war years as "memory conceived as an act of reconnaissance." In Iraqi Poetry Today, one finds a spirit kindred to Blunden, even though for most Iraqis, […]
by Michelle Naka Pierce Juliana Spahr's books of poetry include the 1995 National Poetry Series winner Response and the more recent volume Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). She taught poetry and poetics in the Department of English at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa up until last year. She currently teaches creative […]