On Writers and Drinking Olivia Laing Picador ($26) by Matthew Schneeman In The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, Olivia Laing emotively employs the works of six great American writers, their biographical content, and her own history in an attempt to dissect alcoholism and the seeming relation it has with writers. Although an […]

Monica Mody 1913 Press ($16) by Elizabeth Robinson Monica Mody’s Kala Pani brings together theater, folklore, faux-journalism, the suspending enjambments of poetry, and the disruptions and connections of electronic media in a fascinating formal pastiche that creates an environment of “mythic static.” Titled ostensibly after a British colonial prison to which Indian political prisoners were […]

Sandy Florian Noemi Press ($15) by Peter Grandbois Sandy Florian’s Boxing the Compass defies categorization, subverts genre, and reframes our ideas of what story and language can do—all the while remaining intensely readable. In fact, upon “finishing” the book, this reader had to read it again. Perhaps a reader doesn’t ever “finish” a book like […]

by Mark Gustafson Sarah Churchwell, Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia, grew up in the Midwest and received degrees from Vassar College and Princeton University. Her elongated academic title hints at her scholarly interests, which range widely across American (and English) literature as well as […]

Diane Raptosh Etruscan Press ($17.95) by Daniela Gioseffi American Amnesiac is Diane Raptosh’s fourth book of poetry, and very possibly her best. She attempts something quite unusual with this magnum opus—one long poem spoken in the persona of an older man suffering from amnesia. The book constitutes his stream of consciousness as he attempts to […]

Lauren Camp Edwin E. Smith Publishing ($14.95) by Richard Oyama “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “and still retain the ability to function.” That was close to how I experienced The Dailiness, Lauren Camp’s stirring new poetry […]

Lawrence Giffin Ugly Duckling Presse ($16) by Stephen Burt Disturbing and bitter, haunting and at times bizarre, Lawrence Giffin’s collection of sequences and stand-alone poems can look like “theory,” or like collage, but it’s far more: Giffin uses his own dry articulations along with his sources (stories about feral children, the story of Jesus, “theory,” […]

by John Madera In the first section of Lance Olsen’s 2010 book Calendar of Regrets (FC2), which is told from a close-third narration in Hieronymus Bosch’s perspective, we’re offered this admonition: “Look closely: everything is webbed with everything, existence an illuminated manuscript you walk through” This passage could serve as a key to the entire […]